FMOD Studio Scatterers

**kevinregamey *[*7:24 PM*]***

**1.​** Scatterer modules have a 3D panner built in, but hidden, with a min-max of ``0-20``.
***​2.​** This means that if you put a 3D panner on the master track of an event with Scatterer, it's summing the attenuation curve with that of the hidden 3D panner in your scatterer module.*

***3.​** From Joseph Harvey @ Firelight in my chat: "The scatterer NEEDS to have a 3D panner built in, because without 3D panning there would be no attenuation from scattering.". This makes enough sense to me I think - it's basically fundamentally how a 3D panner works, attenuating different speaker channels depending on the position of the sound in 3D space.*

***​4.​** THAT SAID, if you want a given sound to be spawned within a given 3D spherical space, and for that sound instance to have its own roll-off of ``X-Y``, you need to do it by nesting an Event Sound within that scatterer's playlist. In this case, the default roll-off of ``0-20`` would be ignored in place of the Event Sound's dedicated roll-off of ``X-Y``.*

***​5.​** This is all fine, and makes enough sense I think (though I'm still in the midst of rewiring my understanding of this whole thing) but the fact is that this information is communicated literally nowhere. I read the documentation out loud, and Joseph said, "that info box in the documentation is inaccurate".*

**jamesdean *[*7:26*]***

 Is the nested event sound in the scatter playlist empty? Used just to set attenuation and override the built in panner?

**kevinregamey *[*7:29 PM*]*** No, the default attenuation applies to ALL SINGLE SOUNDS in the playlist.
*All the single sounds you'd otherwise have there should INSTEAD be in a Multi Sound module in the nested event.*

So, therefore, you could potentially have several different sounds with their own dedicated attenuation curves by having multiple nested events in the scatterer's playlist.

Does that make sense?

**jamesdean *[*7:30 PM*]*** ah ok, then chuck that nested event into the scatter playlist?

**kevinregamey *[*7:30 PM*]*** Yeah exactly.

So you'd have a playlist of a single nested event, typically.

*(Additionally, from Joseph Harvey @ FMOD:)*

```
Any events that include 3D panner effect modules or position-based built-in parameters are 3D. Single sound modules that appear in scatterer sound module playlists are also 3D, as placing a single sound module in a scatterer sound module automatically applies a hidden 3D Panner effect to that single sound. As a result, any playlist entries that are single sound modules or whose associated events are 3D, are 3D playlist entries. All other playlist entries are 2D.

Every time a scatterer sound module spawns an instance of one of its playlist entries, it feeds that playlist entry positional information generated from the scatterer sound module's "Min & Max Scatter Distance" properties. This is used to set the values of the playlist entry's 3D Panner effect module (if present) and its position-based built-in parameters (if present). (In fact, this is technically true of 2D playlist entries as well, but since 2D playlist entries by definition never have 3D Panner effect modules or built-in parameters, the positional data doesn't actually affect their behaviour in any way.)

```