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Implementation

Purpose

The purpose of this video and page is to detail my experience with implementation using Unreal & Wwise. This project was an exercise in honing my implementation and creativity to show diversity in my skills. I feel like its always easier to just add sounds to pre-existing material for a full audio redesign but something special comes from implementing your own sounds in an actual game and seeing how they work. 

Process

The process for this sound design project began with some gameplay footage without sound. My process when it comes to redesigns is to normally spot each action on screen so I have a good jumping-off point on what sounds I am looking for and their placement. With this project, however, I made an asset list to coincide with each action of our main robotic character. This gave me a greater sense of what actions I needed to create audio for. I also included variations. I feel that variations are extremely important in making a repetitive sound stand out and be different.  ALong with each action I also detailed the WWise events as it would also make my job even easier when it comes to implementation.

Asset List.png

The next step in my process was the bulk of the sound design. With my actions in place as well as an image of my robotic main character and setting I set out to design sounds that were borderline practical but also larger than life. For this project, I combined field recordings of busy bustling city streets with police sirens to give the world our ambiance. For our main character, I designed sounds for his movement using servo motors pitch-shifted in various octaves to give him an even more robotic feeling. For his hulking footsteps, I recorded steel toe boots stomping around on concrete and layered them with bass drums. For the sound of explosions, I sourced some recorded explosion samples from a Pro Sound Effects Library. All in all this project was a ton of fun allowing me to  flex both my sound design and recording skills. 

PT Session.png

After the design portion, it was time to set up a WWise project and begin my implementation. Within WWise I began to create my events to be triggered in Unreal. Each event contained a sound I designed in Pro Tools. I created random containers to hold any variation I had created. After adding all of my project events I began to get a baseline mix before getting ready to implement in Unreal. 

WWIse Mix Window.png

The final step was to implement the audio and mix using Unreal and the middleware WWise linked together. In Unreal I created AK Events and generated a soundbank tied to each of the robot's actions. I also created stop events to trigger some sounds to stop when the robot had passed a certain stage of the level. Overall this experience taught me patience and flexibility in terms of my skills. Thanks for reading!

Unreal Edit Window.png
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