Are all Steinberg VSTi just mono/stereo or do they have something for surround/immersive?

Virtual instruments HALion
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I’m working on the Dolby Atmos mix of a client’s song and I need surround brass. My only option appears to be to drop nearly $6k on Vienna, which I’ll eventually due, but for right now I need a quick substitute that doesn’t require going through accounting and waiting for budget approval. I can pay a few hundred bucks out of pocket and just get my money back later.

Is there a way to route a single instance of Halion SE out to more outputs? Could I do it with the full version of Halion? What about Iconica? This project is due in less than a week and the horns have to be replaced. The client is gonna get butt-hurt if I say "Well, shouldn’t have sent me tracks with a soft clipper on. If I tell them I had to replace it to get the real orchestra feel for the Dolby Atmos mix, it’ll actually be appreciated; so its important that I find a way

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  1. You can double and then route multiple HSSE brass instrument slots to independent outputs. I.E. Double a horn sound, set them both to respond to the same MIDI channel, and route the output of each to independent outputs, which could be sent to different channels of a surround sound mix.

  2. I’m not sure what host/DAW you use, but in Nuendo and Cubase Pro, you can make a surround sound Master channel, and you can also make group tracks that feature surround sound panners. I suspect that most professional level DAWs on the market offer something similar. Such group tracks would not be limited to HALion plugins, but it’d work with any VSTi plugin (or audio input) that you like.

I.E. Make a group track with surround sound settings, route your desired Plugin/Audio Track/Mic outputs into this group. Now you can pan the group where you want it in the surround sound mix.

  1. It’s possible to double/layer multiple HSSE instrument slots (as well as other VSTi plugins), as well as independent instances of plugins, into surround sound group channels, and apply all sorts of realtime performance mods/effects (delays/humanization/quantization/etc) through the tracks’ inserts; hence you could get a very flexible and interesting surround sound mix.

I.E. Clone the Trombone Track several times. Send the output of each directly to the target channels in the surround sound mix, or use pannable surround sound group tracks as an intermediary for even more control over placement in the sound-scape. You could delay some of the tracks by a few tick (or even randomize/humanize that delay) if you want to simulate more distance or echo in the mix.