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This tab is for creating barriers, which are actors Volumator uses to create fake geometry to constrain and compartmentalise discrete areas in a map.
For example, a large room may be connected to an open corridor and it's necessary for the room and corridor to have two different volumes. By adding a barrier between them we create a fake wall that will separate the two areas. Then when Volumator runs it will easily be able to create two separate volumes with no impact to the rest of your game.
Barriers are editor-only and do not interfere with anything outside of Volumator's detection processes.
There are three types of barrier actor:
Barrier Volumes (3 dimensional boxes)
Barrier Planes (2 dimensional sheets)
Barrier fences (chains of planes)
Each has their strengths and weaknesses, although they all function the same way to block scanning traces and drone movements.
Beyond creation, this panel also includes productivity tools related to barriers.
As a reminder, each setting mentioned on here will have more detailed information in the appropriate Settings page elsewhere on this site.
Barrier Tutorial
Create Barrier Volume
These are three dimensional like other volumes, although can only be cuboid in shape.
They are simple to create, simply position the camera in the middle of an open area like an open doorway or window, facing the camera fowards and press the create Barrier Volume button.
Many hundreds of line traces will fire to the left and right of the camera location at various angles and offsets from your location. They fan out in a sort of 'angel wings' pattern, searching out parallel walls that could constitute the frame of a doorway or window.
Various maths is carried out on the data trying to cull false positives and clean up the data, but essentially if enough good points are detected then a box is created to match the shape.
The 'depth' of the volume, meaning how long it is, is determine by the 'Volume Depth' barrier setting, this is not detected as it's too unreliable to use and typically you want a fairly known depth.
Barrier Volumes are preferrable when you need to put a clear and crude 'stopper' on a volume's reach. They work very well because of their 3 dimensional nature so don't need to be quite as accurately positioned.
Create Barrier Plane
Unlike barrier volumes, planes are 2 dimensional and act more like a sheet.
They are created in exactly the same way and will do their best to position to the edge of the detected area, with the edge being the one closest to the camera. In the example on the right, you can see the plane has positioned itself handly right on the outside edge of the doorway.
Planes are very handy when you have two adjoining areas that both require accurate volumes up to their extremities. Adding a barrier volume at the point where they join would stop the volumes from filling all the space, as the barrier volume will 'eat' into the detectable area as it blocks detection. As planes are 2 dimensional and infinitely 'thin', they do not cause this problem and you can happily place a plane between two adjoining areas, knowing that the adjoining volumes you generate will be created right next to each other.
However, because they are only 2D, there is less room for error as there's no depth to them, so it's more important that the plane fully covers the area to be blocked. It's often a good idea to make them slightly larger than the space, just to be sure. This is where the 'Barrier Expand' setting can be used to easily increase the size.
Barrier planes are recommended for windows and thin transition areas.
Build Mode: Vertical or Horizontal
The build mode button lets you select whether barrier volumes or planes will be created vertically (like walls) or horizontally (like floors/ceilings).
The default is vertical and is how you'll likely want to use them most of the time to create invisible wall geometry.
The most obvious main uses for horizontal barriers are to stop drones from flying out of skylights or trap doors, especially where 'Drone Height Verticality' has been increased giving drones the ability to fly up and down a lot.
Another good use is to specifiy the height of volumes. As barriers are taken into account when detecting the height of a volume, you can use them to specify the height using horizontal barriers. This is especially useful for depots, so that when depots are rebuilt they are a consistent height.
Barrier Fences
Barrier fences are like chains of barrier planes joined together. They are helpful when trying to block off larger or curved areas such as exteriors.
They are created similarly to the Manual Path Building volumes on the Build panel. Click 'Start Building Barrier Fence' and two new buttons will appear: 'add point' and 'finish building'. Fly around and add a point at each 'fence post' until you have finished building your fence then press 'finish' to complete it.
The height of the fence is influenced by the 'Min Fence Height'. The height is determined by looking at the height range of your added points, this will become the fence height, unless it's lower than the Min Fence Height, in which case this value is used, to ensure the fence is suitably high.
If you need to change the height afterwards, each fence mesh will respect it's scale value, so scale them up individually.
Barrier fences are great for sectioning off areas that don't already have geometry. The example on the right shows an area that is being constrained by a barrier fence made up from 5 added points (including start and finish points). In this example we could drop a drone in the middle of this area and it'll constrain the scanning and drone movement to this area.
Barrier fences are not closed loops as usually you don't need loops. Pressing 'finish' will simply add the final point and end the fence at that point.
Select Closest Barrier
This utility button simply selects the closest barrier volume, plane or fence actor. It makes it easier to find barriers when opacity is disabled as you may have chosen to make the barriers invisible.
In the case of fences, it uses the actor location, so if you have a very large fence area it may choose a different actor if it's origin is closer. If this bugs you please contact me and I'll build a more complex system.
Barrier Opacity
Volumator Barrier Volumes and Planes would normally be wireframe only and therefore transparent. Because we usually extend them into geometry, this can make them appear completely invisible as the wireframe is masked by the geometry.
Both actors therefore have an opacity component on them, this can allow you to see and select them easier. However, as they will be placed over significant areas of the map and having them visible/selectable could be distracting the opacity is disabled by default.
You can toggle opacity of all barriers in the current map by pressing the Enable/Disable Barrier Opacity. The name will reflect whether barriers are currently being shown.
You can also enable the 'Barrier Opacity On Create' setting in Barrier Settings, this will enable the opacity on all newly created barriers, it's disabled by default.
Also note there is a 'Show Barriers' variable in Detection Settings that will enable opacity during the detection phase of volume building, so you can easily observe barriers while building. See the Detection Settings section for more info.
Finally, on creation of a barrier, we spawn a debug box in the map for a few seconds, so you can briefly see the outline, see below.
Opacity enabled
Opacity disabled
On the left, we can see a portal volume shortly after creation. The volume itself, the orange wireframe is hard to see as it's transparent and the wireframe is hidden by geometry. If we were inside the tunnel we wouldn't be able to see the wireframe at all. This makes it hard to see if it was created correctly.
We can enable opacity, either with the 'Enable Barrier Opacity' button (which toggles ALL barriers on/off), or enabling the 'Barrier Opacity on Create' setting (which enables opacity on new volumes, see setting below). But we may not want to have opacity on barriers as it can interfere with your work in these ares.
So as an additional feedback, we show a debug box for a few seconds that represents the detected space, so it should not be hidden by geometry. It doesn't include the 'barrier expand' amount, which pushes the barrier into geometry a little for extra saftey. This means the size doesn't exactly match (as you can see in the image) but the shape and orientation is otherwise identical.
Finally, we can see the detected points in purple. These are just shown to give you feedback as to what was detected for debugging in case it wasn't detected as expected.
Reorient Barrier
This utility tool allows you to rotate the barrier volume's internal structure and can be incredibly helpful with Audiokinetic Wwise, where the direction of AkAcousticPortals is very important.
Rather than simply rotating the volume actor, it remaps the X and Y dimensions so that the internal structure is rotated while keeping the real-world dimensions the same.
If your barrier is the correct shape but the actor is internally rotated by 90 degrees, you can simply change the orientation with this button.
Above we see an AkAcousticPortal being used as a barrier. It's the correct shape for the doorway, but the rotation of the actor is incorrect and facing to the sides rather than the front/back of the doorway (see the red line in the center of the portal).
By manually rotating the actor, we now have it facing the correct way, but obviously the shape is now incorrect for the doorway. The centre line is now blue indicating it's correctly detecting volumes, but obviously we can't use this as the shape is incorrect.
Going back to the original rotation (the first image) we can simply press Reorient Barrier and the shape visually remains the same, matching the doorway, but the internal direction of the actor has shift by 90 degrees so it's now correctly pointing out the doorway.
The main caveat to using Reorient Barrier is that it'll only work if your Roll and Pitch rotations are zero, which they probably are, but it's worth mentioning. Volumator will give you a warning if you attempt to Reorient a barrier that has been rotated in these axis and refuse to rotate them.
Barriers and Audiokinetic Wwise
The audio middleware Wwise makes extensive use of volumes in rooms for it's spatial audio system. Rooms are joined together with AkAcousticPortals, that act as connectors to funnel audio between rooms.
Volumator's barrier volumes were created with this in mind. Change the Barrier Volume class to AkPortal and now your barrier volumes serve two purposes: firstly they block open doorways, etc as described above. Secondly the barrier volumes also function as portals to connect rooms together in Wwise.
This approach effectively kills two birds with one stone and can save time and trouble when setting up portals.
Other systems that use volumes to bridge adjoining rooms can also make use of this approach, so keep it in mind.
On the right you can see an AkPortal that was built by volumator acting as a barrier volume (Volumator has AkAcousticPortal set as it's barrier volume class).
Below that you can see the setting to specify a Barrier Volume class, if you want to override it with something else. Note, this only impacts Barrier VOLUMES, not Barrier Planes or Fences.
You may also want to set a couple of other settings if you're using Volumator with Wwise:
Generation Settings Advanced / No Edges on Barriers - this will ensure the volume has no vertices/edges on your barriers/portals, which can with Wwise as I've had reports that Wwise doesn't portal well if the volume has an edge within the portal
Barrier Settings / Barrier Volumes As Planes - during volumator detection this will convert barriers/portals into planes that are detected at the central mid-line. This means that portals that have been extended to create smooth transitions don't create weird volumes that jut into the room, instead only the central line in the barrier/plane is used to block volumator rays.
Both of these settings are further explaining in their respective Settings pages with images to better demonstrate.
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