Andrew Taival
AIA Weapons Blog
This is a run down of the process of creating the sounds for the weapon. I give a small rundown of each sound and than finally give a small explanation on the implementation of the sounds into the game.
Starting out with the main gun sound I used some of the raw sample files we were given for the project and used a pressure fire extinguisher sound for the main weapon firing. I than used a sliding pitch shift, shifting it down 50% of it’s original pitch. On top of the fire extinguisher I added an effect of underwater fireworks and down sampled the wav down to 11,025Hz from 44.1KHz. Finally I added a slight reverb onto the sound to get it a short tail end and eq’d the low end to give it a slightly stronger kick. For the second version of the gun sound I used to same extinguisher sound but pitch shifted it up 50% and used a slightly different sounding underwater firework, which was than also down sampled to 16,000Hz. I pitch shifted these sounds differently to get a slight variation in the sound of the weapon while still being typically the same sound being used in general.
For the layer sound for the main gun I used a typical electricity sound you may hear and pitch shifted it down. On top of that I added a crunching sound effect which I down sampled to 22,050Hz to give it that crackling effect.
For the sound of the picking up of the weapon I used the sound of a case latching and layered it with plastic impacting some kind of object. I eq’d the high end frequencies of the plastic to make it stand out a bit more.
For the ammo pickup sound I used the sound of an M-16 clip being loaded and boosted the low and mid range frequencies slightly. I used this clip sound mainly because when going through different gun clips being loaded this one sounded like it had more weight behind it. A bigger sound compared to a pistol clip being loaded.
For the alt fire of the weapon I used a “space zap” sound layered with a cartoonish sounding zap sound. The space zap I pitch shifted down while the cartoonish one I pitch shifted up. I than used space designer to give the sound a diffusion reverb, on the tail end of it, to give it an exotic or futuristic sounding fire.
For the impact of the alt fire sphere, when it hits a barrier, I used what sound like an object impacting with another object and it had a type of dissipation on it. That I than pitch shifted slightly up in scale.
The sound of the orb traveling I used a fantasy ambience sound which I up sampled
from 44.1KHz up to 120KHz.
Finally for the explosion I used a weapon discharge sound that layered with an electronic explosion sound and than boosted the lows a bit and brought the over all volume of the electronic explosion up to give it a nice attack.
To implement the sounds into the game I used SoundCues to replace the original sounds of the gun in the game. The SoundCues are basically a blue print on what, if anythingthe sound itself is traveling through to get into the game whether that be modulation nodes, attenuation or even randomization of sounds. The sound cues had a flow chart starting from the right side of the diagram screen with the actual sound file, flowing to the left hand side of the diagram where there was a speaker that the sound eventually connected to, to be implemented into the game. The main weapon sound for example had three different sound wavs associated with it. The main gun sound and the second gun sound were connected to a random node (nodes for the SoundCues are the different processes on the way to the speaker) connected to the two sound wavs. The node itself has properties which can be manipulated to the volume and the pitch play between a given range randomly to break the consistency even more. This random node was than mixed with a mix node which was also connected to the layering sound effect to add yet another layer to the over all gun sound.
This is my second AIA blog posting dealing with a map for UDK (Unreal Development Kit) called Red Square. The map itself takes place in a winter setting somewhere in Russia. I assume this due to the statue in the middle of the map with two crossed Soviet Union flags behind it. To begin, the ambience I used for the exterior setting has very low wind gust sounds as well as what may seem like steam or machines running. This ambience fit the scene very well seeing as it is a dark, snowy winter night in the middle of some empty square. For stingers on the map (sounds used to break the monotony of the ambience) I started by adding two short vocal tracks that seem to be coming from the statue. Both tracks are short clips taken from speeches given by Joseph Stalin. These two clips randomly play every 5-15 seconds. Also for some stingers I added sounds of artillery, machine gun fire and explosions that seem to be off in the distance to make it seem that this square is somewhere near a battle. In the hidden room with the portal I added an interior ambience that had a lot of reverb sound, very boomy.
I put a reverb volume, ambience zone around the hidden room. It prevents the ambience outside of the room from being played in the room while vice versa with the sound in the room being played outside of the room. I allowed some of the stingers from outside the room (the gun fire, the vocal tracks and explosions) to be heard while in the room by turning down the volume of these while in the room but boosting the Low pass filter of these sounds.
Most of the sounds I used for this map were actual gunfire sounds for the stingers that I used from a sound library. The Stalin speeches I actually searched for and found two different speeches on a site with many historic speeches available to down load. For these sounds, the speech and gun fire, the only processing I did was putting some reverb on them. The sounds of the jump pad, the med-kit pick up and the portal I synthesized. The jump pad and the portal sound I than pitch and tempo shifted.