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!
School of Video Game Audio - Wwise Effects Processing
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.
New Recorder - Zoom H2n
The Zoom H2n recorder. Small but powerful!
I picked up a new field recorder, the nifty little Zoom H2n!
I've been getting more into stealth field recording after reading Paul Virostek's Field Recording: From Research to Wrap book, and I wanted to get a recording setup better suited to capturing sounds surreptitiously. After hearing lots of good things about the H2n and seeing several sound designers I follow use the device, I decided to take the plunge and grab one myself.
As it's quite a small recorder, the H2n is really good for capturing sounds in public spaces without people noticing that you're recording them! So far, I've been having a lot of fun recording train ambiences. The recording below is from inside a train carriage where I was able to capture some nice and quiet train walla from people indistinctly chatting. I used the H2n's onboard mics in the X/Y configuration:
This next recording is from a pair of Roland CS-10EMs plugged into the H2n, where I captured the sound of the train pulling into Dewsbury station. Really like how this one turned out, as you can really get the impression of the train going past your ears from left to right!
While it lacks some of the basic features, such as XLR inputs found on my other recorder, the Zoom H4n, the cool thing about the H2n is that it has a lot more mics built into it as preset configurations. The four main recording modes are Mid-side, X/Y, 2-channel surround and 4-channel surround, and each of these can be tweaked further for greater/lesser stereo width. This means that it's a really useful recorder to grab spontaneous recordings with when I'm out and about, without having to lug around a bunch of extra stands, cables and mics with me on the off-chance I find something interesting to record.
The slight drawback I've encountered with the unit so far is that the surround sound recording capabilities are not as good as I was hoping for. The H2n can record to a max sample rate of 96kHz and to 24-bit depth for the mid-side, X/Y and 2-channel blended surround modes, but if you want to make a discrete 4-channel surround recording, the device can only record to 48kHz/24-bit. Though 48kHz is the post-production standard sample rate, it would have been nice to be able to record at max quality to make it easier to pitch-shift your recordings without introducing a load of unwanted artefacts into your sounds.
Still, I'm having a lot of fun using the H2n as my go-to stealth recorder. Time to slink back into the shadows and find more things to record!
May 2018 Sound Design Showreel
Made my first sound design reel! Picked a few sections from the various projects I worked on during the past year of my studies that show my implementation and sound design skills. It's rough and needs a lot of work, but hey for my first reel I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out.