My first assignment on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course was to implement footstep sounds into a blank Wwise project in three different ways.
The first task involved creating a footstep play event that would alternate sounds between the left and right foot. To do this, I filled two random containers with the sounds for the left and right footsteps, set them to shuffle, and then made them both children of a parent sequence container. With this sequence container plugged into the target object slot of the play action on the Play_Part1_Footstep event, the event would then swap between the left and right foot sounds each time it was called.
The second task involved separating each footstep sound into discrete heel and toe segments so that they could be triggered by specific key frames of a character's walk animation. This involved creating a Footsteps switch container, which contained separate heel and toe sequence containers for each foot, and four switch groups that corresponded to each of these containers. This way, as the character walks, the game can make calls for specific footstep sounds and Wwise will randomly select an appropriate sound from the appropriate container.
I later learned that a much simpler solution to this challenge was to instead use two switch containers and two switches. One switch container can be set up to contain the left and right heel random containers, while the other contains the left and right toe containers. This way, you then only need to have two switches, left and right, for the game to be able to select which set of footstep sounds should be playing, rather than having to make switches for each part of both feet.
The third part of the assignment was to create a play footstep event that would alternate between left and right feet and play toe-heel sections concurrently without using a switch container. I achieved this using a series of nested sequence containers.
Once again I later discovered that a more elegant solution to using multiple sequence containers was to simply use multiple play actions within the Play_Part3_Footstep event.
Two play actions are used here to get the heel and toe components to play back within the Play_Part3_Footstep. A slight delay has been added to the toe component so that it plays back just after the heel sound.