Hi! I’ve been making music and designing sound for 10+ years. The thing is, I’ve been playing video games for way longer, but I’m just now beginning to accept that I should design sounds for a broader medium of experience on Unreal Engine.
My question is, where should I begin? I just downloaded Unreal Engine via Epic Games launcher. I would appreciate web resources, podcasts, lectures.. anything I can get my hands on to grasp this software.
Again, I’ve been an obssessive synthesist for a long time. This question is not asking how to design sounds from scratch. Specifically, it is a question coming from someone who knows how to design sound but wants to use Unreal Engine.
After I post this, I will begin to practice with Unreal Engine.
Thanks!
Best,
Erik
Hi there @AnhDuongCoBap, welcome to the community!
Well, audio isn’t my specialty, but hopefully I can point you in the right direction.
The Unreal documentation is fairly robust, and they have an entire section of documentation about audio in Unreal, so this is probably going to be the best place to start. Here is their documentation on Metasounds- a new feature for procedural sound creation in Unreal.
Unfortunately, most tutorials are directed towards game designers learning audio, not the other way around, so I have a feeling you’ll run into a lot of information you already know, but here are some good starting tutorials:
Take the engine out of the equation - learn to design sound(s) specifically for videogames.
Chances are its probably not all that different from what you already know and do.
Each engine inplements things slightly different thereafter. But.
They generally all have spacially adaptive sound (so the sound is dampened locally to the 3d world it is in.
Some engines (not unreal) take that to the extreme by making almost 0 work on your part.
Put a sound in a properly designed building and it will echo just based on the acoustics calculated off collisions.
Others, like unreal, will require you to step in and manipulate things a bit.
Btw, remeber that 90% of the industry treats sound as an afterthought. If even.
The days of games like Oddworld are far past and will likely never come to be again. Blind/impared people are always just sol when it comes to videogames…
I have really never seen anyone even try anymore.
AAA stuff is often shippped with music destroying dialogues, inappropriate levels/pitches, and just badly placed queues…
