Audiokinetic

, , , , , , ,

October '23

, , , , , , ,

Happy Halloween folks! 🎃 Here’s a brief rundown of what’s been going on with me sound design-(W)wise with me in October.

Lost Skies - Davey Wards Silver Winner

REALTIME recently announced that the Lost Skies animated trailer has won a Silver Award at the 2023 Davey Awards!

Once again, massive congrats to Justin Andree at Blitz Audio, and all the folks at REALTIME, Bossa Games, Rumpus Animation & Humble Bundle for another awesome achievement! I’m chuffed to have been able to play a small part in this lovely project - the sound design for this trailer was a real joy to work on!

Wwise Training - 3D Audio Mixing

At the tail end of September, I attended one of Audiokinetic’s online training sessions to learn more about the workflow for 3D Audio Mixing in Wwise. While spatial audio is an extremely exciting area of much innovation in the field of game audio, in my opinion, it also comes with a significantly steep learning curve. I’ve found that it can be challenging just to get one’s head around some of the tricky concepts involved (all of which build upon each other in complicated ways), let alone feel prepared enough to be able to confidently author and implement assets for a spatial audio project. For this reason, when I saw this training session, I knew that I had to make sure I attended no matter what!

This was an incredibly useful and engaging session that covered a lot of ground in a short space of time. While there was only so much that could reasonably be covered in the 4-hour runtime, I do now feel much more confident with the spatial audio workflow in Wwise, and I’m looking forward to putting these strategies into practice in my future projects.

Wwise 101 Revision

I’ve been going through the Wwise 101 materials again to brush up on the core fundamentals ahead of taking the 301 and 251 certifications. The last time I went step-by-step through all of the 101 documentation was back in 2018, so it felt like it was due time for me to have a bit of a refresh.

I did have a couple of stumbles in the last few modules (no thanks to some slightly odd wording in pair of questions asking about the exact definitions of aux buses and effects rendering), but other than that, I think it went fairly well.

The next step in my plan to become more (W)wisened is to tackle the 301 cert, so it’s time to lace up my adventuring books, pick up my sword and prepare for the journey into the Wwise Adventure Game’s Allegro Kingdom. Wish me luck!

Post apocalyptic Desert

One of the audio implementation projects I’m currently chipping away at is a sound re-design for the ‘Post Apocalyptic Desert’ UE4 environment asset by KK Design. I’ve been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and really enjoying how the sounds have been designed and implemented for the various vehicles of Night City - parituclarly the older, clunkier trucks and jeeps that tend to appear in the nomadic Badlands on the megacity’s outskirts.

Post Apocalyptic Desert is a complete project, that most importantly for my purposes, contains a cool rugged vehicle.

One small but very satisfying bit of progress so far has been learning how to swap out the the defaut UE4 mannequin with one a bit more character - namely the ‘Cyberpunk Mercenary’ model by Fajrul Falakh NF - Characters.

I’m still in the early stages of this design, but I’m pleased with what I’ve been able to get done so far - namely, getting a lot of print string nodes in place ready for sounds to be dropped in later. Having just watched Michał Pukała’s super-inspiring Taking It Up A Notch Game Sound Con talk, which focused how the audio team at CD Projekt Red approached upgrading and overhauling their vehicle audio content and pipeline, I’m keen to see if I can try and replicate some of their techniques they used to bring Night City’s cars to life, albiet on a much, MUCH, smaller scale (i.e. 1 car versus 100s of cars!)

, , , , , , ,

Wwise Up On Air - Community Spotlight Feature

, , , , , , ,

I got a really cool shout-out from the awesome Damian Kastbauer on the Audiokinetic Twitch channel!

Damian checked out some of blog posts I made during my final year of university when I was working on an audio re-design for the Unity 3D Adventure Game as my final year honours project.

For this project, I muted all the original sounds and music running natively from the Unity audio engine, and designed and implemented new audio into the game using Wwise. As a method of logging my progress while working on the project, I wrote weekly blog posts about the challenges I would face trying to implement various audio features into the game, and how I eventually found solutions to said challenges…which usually involved a lot of tinkering in C# and breaking scripts!

Audiokinetic went live on Twitch. Catch up on their VOD now.

Thanks for reading my blog Damian!

, , , , , , , , , ,

School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Demo Reel

, , , , , , , , , ,

Here's the Wwise demo reel I made after taking the fantastic Wwise course at the School of Video Game Audio. Overall, I’m pleased with the audio assets I produced for my audio re-design of the Wwise Adventure Game, and I feel that I’ve been able to implement them appropriately via the Unity-Wwise integration. However, I also feel that my interactive mixing skills definitely need a lot more attention! My source ambiences such as the windmill and river still feel a bit too loud in the mix in places, and I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked on getting my SFX objects consistently organised into actor-mixers, which would have allowed me a much finger degree of control at the mixing stage. Still, on the whole, I'm pleased with what I was able to accomplish during my time on the course, and I feel that I now have a decent grasp on the fundamentals of Wwise. Thanks for all your help and guidance Leonard + Viviana!

, , , , , , , ,

School of Video Game Audio - Monster Sounds

, , , , , , , ,

Made some fun monster sounds this week on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course. I had to design and implement the sound for the enemy Evil Spit Plant in the Wwise Adventure game.

Sound Design

I approached my design for the enemy plant death sound by first recording gameplay footage of the plant death animation. After watching this animation numerous times, I decided to break the plant death sound down into four constituent parts that matched the character's death animation. These parts were screams, gurgles, rustles and impacts;

Screams

For the scream sounds, I used samples from the Monster Within sound pack by Soundmorph. I wanted to get a short, punchy pain sound that would immediately indicate to the player that they had successfully killed the spit plant. I found a collection of small monster shrieks in this pack that fit my needs perfectly.

Gurgles

Directly following the scream, I wanted a longer, drawn-out death gurgle to go with the enemy plant's writhing death animation, to suggest that it's still in considerable pain as it thrashes around in its death throes. I recorded these sounds myself by making some croaky, gurgling noises in my throat - disgusting, I know, but hey, they sounded pretty good and that's what matters!

Recording comedic death gurgles in the VO booth at Futureworks. The dark environment really helped me get into character!

Having recorded my gurgles at 192kHz, I had considerable flexibility with regard to pitch shifting at the edit stage. I processed the gurgles by pitching them +1 semitone up and applying a generous amount of distortion before then running them through Krotos Audio's Simple Monsters plug-in. This made the gurgle sounds I recorded feel considerably more alien, gross and wet sounding.

Rustles

As the Evil Spit Plant is an organic creature, I wanted to include some natural, organic sounds in with the highly-processed and alien-sounding vocal layers to balance them out. The plant's death animation involves a lot of shaking and writhing around, so I thought including a rustling grassy layer to the death sound would help make the enemy feel more believable and grounded in the reality of the game world. I used some grass rustle samples from the Sonniss  Game Audio GDC 2018 bundle as the sounds for this layer.

Impacts

Finally, the impact layer was to act as the sound for plant's body hitting the ground as it dies. I used some recordings I had made during a recent trip to a nature reserve of hitting grass and other bits of foliage with my hands (yep, it looked really stupid but once again it sounded pretty good) as the sounds for this layer.

Wwise Implementation

The screams, gurgles, rustles and impacts were then imported into Wwise as separate layers, with each layer having its own dedicated random container. These random containers were then inserted into the Event_EvilSpitPlant_Death event as separate play actions.

The Enemy_EvilSpitPlant_Death event in my Wwise session. Each layer of the sound has its own random container, with voice volume and pitch offset randomisation applied. Independent delay settings on the play actions were set so as to give the collective death sound a nice unified rhythm.

With all the sounds integrated into Wwise at this point, I then applied a flanger effect to the scream and gurgle layers via the sound's Enemy_EvilSpitPlant actor mixer to accentuate the creepy, poison-filled nature of the creature even more.

I didn't want the flanger effect applied to the organic rustle and impact sounds, so I bypassed the effect on these layers. So, without further ado, here's the final Evil Spit Plant Death sound - voilà!