Dynamic Portal Occlusion for Precomputed Interactive Sound Propagation

An immersive audio-visual experience in games and virtual reality requires fast calculation of diffraction-based acoustic effects. To maintain plausibility, the effects must retain spatial smoothness on source and listener motion within geometrically complex scenes. Precomputed wave-based techniques can render such results at low runtime CPU cost, but remain limited to static scenes. Modeling the occlusion effect of dynamic portals such as doors present an unresolved challenge to maintain audio-visual consistency. We present a fast solution implementable as a drop-in extension to existing precomputed systems. Key is a novel portal-search method that leverages precomputed propagation delay and direction data to find portals intervening the diffracted shortest path connecting dynamic source and listener at runtime. The method scales linearly with number of portals in worst case, far cheaper than explicit global path search that scales with scene area. We discuss culling techniques to accelerate further. The search algorithm is combined with geometric-acoustic approximations to model the additional direct and indirect energy loss from intervening portals depending on their dynamic closure state. We demonstrate plausible audio-visual animations within our system integrated with Unreal Engine 4 (TM) and AudioKinetic Wwise (TM).