FPS Footstep Sounds

Development Programming & Scripting
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Hello everyone,

I am currently working on developing an FPS character, and right now I have reached the footstep sound stage of my FPS character. I decided to implement this system using MetaSound. However, I don’t have much knowledge about MetaSound, and to be honest, my footstep sound assets are not very professional.

My question is: what are the critical nodes that I can use in MetaSound to make my footstep sounds better, and what do these nodes actually do? I would really appreciate any help.

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Hi there,

Not an audio designer myself but till an audio designer makes another comment here is what you can try.

  1. Randomization : Use modulator, mixer to harmonize the sound and the steps. Some additional sounds like debris etc. sometimes can fire or not. This gives you the variations in sound base.
  2. Variation : Use pitch and randomization to change the base sounds slightly. Sometimes even you can delay the starts a bit.
  3. Realization : On Impacts you can query surface hit results and get the surface physical material or type. With this you can use different setups to match surface or you can just add some filters (low pass / high pass) to mimic the surface that character is walking.
  4. Motion : Normally step sounds are not just single sound, there is heel sounds, scrapings. Depends on the game but you can do different audio filters on top or additional audio to be mixed with the characters motion. EX: In stopping move where you detect a big drop in velocity to zero, depending on t he surface footstep can make squeak sounds.

didn’t use meta sounds yet but as I see in docs, random number, pitch shift, random get, actual Wave player will do the most of the job and One-Pole High/Low Pass Filter.

Getting the surface data and a tutorial is over here Creating First Person Footfalls with MetaSounds Presets For Different Terrain | Community tutorial

However if you are looking for realism after surface types , variation randomization is a must to over come the kawainess of the footsteps however can be pushed further with raalization and motion aspects.

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I’ll add to @RedGrimnir ‘s solution:

Here’s a video that includes an overview of something similar for footsteps/armor hits; at 7:30 he talks about changing the footstep sample’s envelope to produce muffled sounds for grass/dirt

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