Feature request: dummy sound channel for envelope follower

I really like the envelope follower source effect but it’s a bit awkward when you’re using it for effects. For example if you’re using attenuation the effect will get weaker when you’re far away, when you really just want the audio part to get weaker and the effect to stay the same as if it was at 100% volume.

I think it would be nice if you could use a dummy sound channel that would play the sound at 100% volume to trigger the envelope follower but not output the sound to the speakers, or any other way to accomplish this. It would be way better for stuff like material effects/lipsync animation systems and in general just “handwritten” audio curves for effects/animations that are suited for effects but not designed to sound beautiful.

This would certainly come in handy. +1

great idea +2

Excellent point. Most DAWs/mixers support this kind of routing- basically a pre-Fader send for the Source Effects. This should be possible, and necessary for certain effects as you point out :).

This is a bug we have fixed in 4.17.

I would hesitate to suggest using audio you can’t hear to drive game events–in these cases, you will find better performance with a curve.

Nice! I’m not too worried about performance on the CPU. For a lipsync system for example you would have some extra flexibility if you could edit the curves (audio) without worrying about the sound getting messed up. Basically the original lipsync line+a bunch of split phonemes that you could edit vs. just the phonemes which you couldn’t edit without messing up the sound of the line.

Animating lipsync by hand is just painful so this would be a way faster way to get this to work. If you use the actual sound half (or more) of the work is already done for you. I would just like a bit more artistic control which you could get by decoupling the actual sounds from the envelope follower curves.

We’ve been kicking around the idea of somehow generating curve assets from SoundWave files, though we’re still exploring the best way to achieve that–but I like the idea of doing that instead of at runtime (at least in the case of pre-recorded VO).

FL studio peak controller? its a bit more versatile than just an envelope controller

https://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/plugins/Fruity%20Peak%20Controller.htm

-Base - Base, or lowest value (offset), of the control output.

-Volume (VOL) - Maximum value of the control output. The control is bi-polar with values from -200% (maximum to left) to 200% (maximum right). When using positive values a higher volume means higher Peak Control output values. Negative volumes result in a ‘ducking’ effect where the Peak Controller output is negative and dips with each input peak. You will need to set this in conjunction with the Base level to create ‘sidechain pumping’ effects. Turn up the Base and then turn the Volume to negative.

-Tension - The shape of the attack and release curve (the controls graphic shows the effect). NOTE: As the attack of most sounds is very short you won’t see or hear an effect of this parameter. It will be most useful on the decay side of the envelope.

-Decay - Time taken to decay to the starting level.

one of the best aspects of FL studio over other DAWS.

You can just take our existing Envelope Follower and modulate the output with a custom curve to get this effect.

I would welcome any way to do it for sure. I guess my method of splitting audio files and creating curves for those would work theoretically. It feels a bit hacky though.

Or if you wanted to create some nice tool to do that maybe you could have something like Papagayo (http://my.smithmicro.com/papagayo.html). You would open a dialogue sound file but instead of text you could drag in curve names (maybe only getting curves with a certain prefix or curves with some extra phoneme checkbox ticked), these curves would then give you some nice auto detected (from amplitude I guess) default start and end duration.

Then when you want to create the next curve (for the next phoneme) you would just drag the curve name to the start of the next phoneme, and when you’re dragging the curve name around you would preview the audio where the pointer is so you could easily tell where the curve should start. You could also have a right click option on the start/end markers to have split or shared start/end markers, for example you’ve got some words with silence in between, use split start/end markers. Or you’ve got a long word without silence, you could use shared start/end markers so the end of every marker is the start of the next one so you could have some nice crossfading.

A tool like this sounds awesome. Just too bad it doesn’t exist! :rolleyes:

Ah right ok, I did wonder that. I’m pretty new to the coding side of things, but trying to learn it all., thanks to blueprints

Yes please! This would be awesome.

re:

While we wait for a way to generate curves in engine, could someone tell me which application to use to do this or what file type I need to output? I started to get close using Adobe After Effects with the Trapcode Soundkeys plugin. I generated the keys and copied the data to a CSV but I’m unsure on how to format it or how to get that into UE as a curve file.