rdSplatTools Tutorial 2.4 – SFX Area
Last Updated: 20th September 2026
Tutorial created using rdSplatTools version 1.00
One of the most useful features of these SplatMaps is controlling the audio, it’s the main reason it was designed. It gives the ability to paint exactly how you want your sfx to sound as the player moves around – you can paint the sound to fit the surrounding landscape – the rdSplatMap is used to control the volume of the water and the direction for spatialization – this is calculated from the gradient of the splatmap.
In this tutorial we paint a river sound around a river, using different values for different areas to create a sound that’s more than just a distance from a spline or row of sound actors.
Step 1. Open or Create a Level with a River
Either load or create a level that has a river in it (or just paint a river onto the landscape like in this example). Use the ThirdPerson Template Character as we will be visualizing the audio and it’s a lot easier to see with that.
Step 2. Paint the rdSplat Mask around the river
Now go into the rdSplatTools Editor mode and with the brush strength at 1.0 and Falloff at 0.0, paint the area of the river.
Step 3. Create the Splat Falloff
Now set the Falloff Amount to something high (here we use 512.0) and click the “Rebuild” button.
Now save the Splatmap and exit back to “Selection” mode.
Step 4. Edit the ThirdPerson Character Blueprint
Now we add the code to spatialize the sound from the splatmap. The First edit is in BeginPlay – add the code below to load the rdSplatMap ready to use:
Now add a Scene Component to the RootComponent of the ThirdPerson BP, then an Audio Component attached to that – set the Audio Components Sound – make sure the sound has an Attenuation applied to it, even the default – as long as it has spatialization enabled – move it out from the center a bit so it’s clearly visible from any angle. Add a Sphere Component attached to the Audio Component and scale it down to around 0.25 in all axis.
Now add the code below to the Tick Event to rotate and move the audio around based on the gradient of the rdSplatMap.
Step 5. Done – Play
Now play, you should see the sphere always point towards the center of the rdSplatMap (River) and the river sounds gets louder as you get closer and moves from ear to ear as you move around.
You can add a routine to move the audio component further from you as the distance increases, and add a LineTrace to find the landscape height at that location if you want to add height based distance too.