My second assignment on the School of Video Game Audio's Wwise course was to record a selection of dry footstep sounds, and then use effects processing in Wwise to simulate how they would sound when played back in a set of different acoustic environments.
I recorded my concrete and grass footsteps using the Foley pits of the Avid S6 studio in Futureworks. I also recorded some gravel surface steps in my backyard at night, but didn't grab any pictures of that session as it was pretty dark!
Using auxiliary buses in the Master/Mixer hierarchy, I routed a collection of footstep recordings to a variety of effect chains that modeled a corridor/passageway, an open exterior environment and a forest area. Specifically, these environments were a passageway and an outdoor section from the AkCube FPS game, and the opening forest environment from Playdead's Limbo.
Here's how my Wwise footstep events sounded with effects processing:
On reflection, the reverb I chose for the corridor sounds way too extreme, and the forest reverb has a high-end ringing element to it which doesn't sound right for the environment. I also should have tried to get the correct reverb sound using just a single reverb, but at the time using a pair of reverbs seemed to create a less boxy reverberation sound that I quite liked. Still, I'm pleased that I now know how to hook up my sounds to effects using aux sends in Wwise.
