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!

Footstep Recording 001

Concrete/flagstone surface recording using Subzero Shotgun and CAD GXL1200BP condenser mics

Footstep Recording 002

Concrete/flagstone surface recording using Subzero Shotgun and CAD GXL1200BP condenser mics

Footstep Recording 003

Grass surface recording using Subzero Shotgun and CAD GXL1200BP condenser mics

Footstep Recording 004

Grass surface recording using Subzero Shotgun and CAD GXL1200BP condenser mics

Footstep Recording 005

Grass surface recording using Subzero Shotgun and CAD GXL1200BP condenser mics

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.

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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.

Tom Bennett

July 10, 2018

2018, Audio Implementation, Game Audio, Middleware, School of Game Audio, Sound Design, Wwise

School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Footstep Implementation

Tom Bennett

July 10, 2018

2018, Audio Implementation, Game Audio, Middleware, School of Game Audio, Sound Design, Wwise

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Tom Bennett

July 2, 2018

2018, Audio Implementation, Game Audio, Middleware, Wwise, School of Game Audio

School of Video Game Audio - Wwise 101: AkCube Game Shotgun Sounds Implementation

Tom Bennett

July 2, 2018

2018, Audio Implementation, Game Audio, Middleware, Wwise, School of Game Audio

Here's a quick video I made after completing the first two sections of the Wwise 101 materials. I implemented sounds for an FPS shotgun blast animation in Wouter Van Oortmerssen's AkCube game, including pump in/out and scattering shell sounds. I used delays on the SFX objects and random containers in the Fire_Shotgun_Player event so that the sounds play in sync with the shotgun firing animation.

Tom Bennett

June 28, 2018

2018, Audio Implementation, Game Audio, Middleware, School of Game Audio, Wwise

School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Course Enrolment

Tom Bennett

June 28, 2018

2018, Audio Implementation, Game Audio, Middleware, School of Game Audio, Wwise

I started on the Wwise course at Paul Leonard's School of Video Game Audio this week. I'm looking forward to finally getting to grips with this important piece of middleware! I'll post updates on my assignments here as I work my way through the course.