As I learn more about using the Wwise sound engine, I have been working on creating new sounds for the open-source FPS Cube.
Here is an early video from when I had just finished adding the basic sound elements for the enemies and weapons*.
The monsters and player voices were are all taken from vocal sounds that I recorded myself. Some were pitched and layers, others vocoded, flanged or otherwise modulated to get the right character. I’m quite proud of the performance I did for the hell pigs.
In this continuing series, I take a look at the sound designs from my Oblivion demo reel clip.
The Flame Atronach, the main enemy in this clip, is a fiery creature from another plane of existence. I wanted to give it an evil, demonic quality. Here are some of the unedited vocals I recorded of myself:
After cleaning up some of the background noise, I applied pitch effects and a little bit of vibrato to get the following:
I thought it was getting close to the right sound, but I also wanted to impart some more menace by modulating the voice clips with elements of rock and fire. I fired up FL Studio and set up a channel with a vocoder so that I could mess around with different carrier waves (roaring fires, road construction, avalanches, etc.)
One of the video clips that I’m redoing the soundtrack takes place on a wooden billboard scaffolding. I needed to record clean footsteps, impacts, and friction sounds, but it can be difficult to control all the variables. There are some boardwalk areas near my house that I’ve recorded in the past, but I’ve always had to struggle with noise from the wind and waves, not to mention distant boat and car traffic. I found a wooden pallet outside of a dumpster the other day and saw my golden opportunity.
This turned out to be pretty good (and free) foley stage.
The clip involves a couple of bodies falling onto wood, so I made myself a foley dummy. I filled a gym bag with shoes, clothes, and books and dropped it from various heights to record these.
This should be good for the main meat of the body falls.
I wanted to record some heartbeat sound effects for a game project to use as an auditory health cue, so I set out to try and build a sort of stethoscope using household items. I took the plastic lid of a cd spindle and wrapped the open end with saran wrap and affixed a rubber band around it to form a diaphragm. I drilled a hole in the other end and attached a cardboard tube that was just wider than one of my condenser microphones.
This is one of the recordings, after a little bit of compression and noise reduction:
I’m going to start writing about the process of sound design from my demo reel. First up is the Oblivion gate from the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
In TES: IV, Oblivion Gates are mysterious portals to a hellish plane of existence. For the base of the sound, I wanted to combine elements of fire (various library sources ranging from campfires to forest infernos), earth (low rumbling earthquake), and electricity (arc welder) in a way that would sell the visuals.
Separate elemental sounds:
Combined together with some effects:
Continue reading
Here’s the latest incarnation of my game project to help me learn FMOD Studio implementation and the Unity 3D development system.
I’ve added a dynamic music system, changed the player movement sounds, and added some textures and materials.
For my Ball-rolling game project in Unity 3d, I needed to replace the temporary engine sound I used as a placeholder. I wanted to record actual rolling friction sounds that would be modulated by the FMOD autopitch function for a more realistic experience. After a bit of experimenting with things I had around the house, I decided on using the big red marble from an optical trackball.
First, I tried the inside of a computer case. It had a nice resonance, but I had difficulty getting more than a half-second’s worth of rolling before it smacked into the side of the lid.
Similar to the metal lid problem, I couldn’t get much of a good roll. I found I could rock it back and forth to sustain it a little longer, but this gave it a seesaw effect of pitching up and down. Note, that this was just a quick test recording I did with the air conditioning running, so the quality is not up to snuff.
A few days later, I took inspiration from the wall of death/wheel of death motorcycle stunts. I started looking for round surfaces that I could rotate the ball around the inside of, centripetally.
The cake carrier gave me quite a few variations in tone. I could use the clear plastic part with or without the bottom lid for different effects.
The metal pot is one that I’ve used in the past for PVKII, to impart the voice of the Heavy Knight with a ringing, metallic resonance. Whether or not the bottom of the pot was damped help give some extra tonal possibilities to the pot as well.
The watering can didn’t end up working out very well for the ball-rolling project, but I did end up sampling it as percussion for the game’s music. Look for a new video of the game project shortly.
Here’s the revised version of my sound replacement demo. The clip comes from the game Arkham Asylum. All sounds and voices were created by me, except for the Harley Q voice, which was done by Ashley Banas.
Unity3d project update:
The player engine sound came from a malfunctioning CD player. I’ll revamp this when I can cleanly record some rolling friction sounds that would fit better.
Todo:
Dynamic music elements
Respawning pickups with random positions
More types of pickups and level features.
The other day, I had just set up my microphone and recorder to get some squishy pasta sounds for alien brains. A minute after I got the take, the jackhammering started from across the canal. I couldn’t record anything else for a while, so I decided to point a shotgun mic at the construction site and roll tape.
Here’s a clip of a project I’ve been working on to cut my teeth on implementing and scripting sound elements with FMOD Studio. I’ve taken the Roll-A-Ball tutorial from Unity as a starting point, tweaked the scoring system and added bumpers.
Things I’d like to add/improve:
The cube hums were synthesized in Alchemy and I recorded the bumper sounds from a lamp.