Audiophiles rejoice! Our next stream will be starring Zak Belica, the Audio Director of Fortnite. Everyone who wants to understand how to utilize beautiful audio tracks or terrifying sound effects in Unreal Engine will not want to miss it.
WHAT
Zak Belica will demonstrate how to control audio using Blueprints.
WHERE
Follow us on the official Unreal Engine Twitch channel:
WHEN
Tuesday, April 21st @ 2:00-3:00PM EST Countdown]
Let’s hear your questions for Zak on Audio. Feel free to ask any questions on the topic in the thread below! We’ll get to as many as we can given our time constraints!
Any plans for Music controllers with features like tracks, layers, fadeIn/Out curves, eventable triggers…ect…
Whats the best way to implement basic audio mixing. For example, you have the Music Channel, Soundscapes Channel, FX Channel, Voice Channel…ect… I want to config custom ducking options like when the Voice is playing dialog and i will duck out the Music, FX channels… as example.
Whats the general roadmap for Audio? I have some audio designs in mind and I’d like to be inline with the Engine future direction =)
How is your team approaching the music mixing for Fortnite? Do you use blueprints and the built in audio engine for the music cues and soundtrack?
(I later recognized that the following question missed the point of the stream. My apologies, kind of in a VR bubble here. Will leave it though, just in case.)
Regarding 3D positional audio for VR, are there plans for supporting that directly in UE4 release builds and via blueprints, either through integration with the Oculus Audio SDK or through a more universal VR implementation, and without the need for a middleware program such as FMOD or WWISE to host plugins?
Question: How would you recommend going about setting up playing BGM that’s been split into different parts, like drums/bass/leads, and keeping them in sync? Ideally for a system that handled situational BGM, introducing the various threads as the game action intensified/calmed.
SFX guys here aswell! I look forward to it! Love ya guys!
What I would like to know alot about is a nice fire sound system for auto fire sounds. A system that not gets affected by your fps, but still doesn’t sound repeating like single loop sound files does.
Also would like to know the secrets of implementing a great ambient sound system. Where you want buildings to automatically have their pre setup interior ambient sound and closes out the outside ambient sounds. More or less how a smart ambient sound world should be in a large scale map with different areas, like forests, building complexes, mountains, caves etc.
If he is using UE’s built in audio system, why? I’m not an audio guy myself but from what I have seen of Wwise when I was helping out our sound guy it looks superior and also is a lot less work for me in terms of code to get stuff implemented.
When referencing some of the example projects, I noticed that a lot of the audio has duplicate audio/sound cues for mono/stereo. Is there a reason to do this since it doubles the amount of audio needed for a project?
When using the in engine compression- do you typically leave it uncompressed and only compress if memory is an issue, or is it common to compress most large audio audio clips to about 50%? I would ideally like to keep everything as high quality as possible, but not noticeably lose performance.
Also, is 44.1 kHz preferable compared to 48 kHz? I work in music, so I’m used to 44.1, but I have noticed that most film/tv is done at 48. Would be good to know before I start the big sound design push for my project, thank you!
As someone who regularly works in Wwise and FMOD, it would be great to hear if and how UE4 can perform some of the key features these other tools have to offer:
Real time mixing and profiling (including errors and playback information)
Didn’t Epic (recently) hire an all audio developer guy to work on audio improvements to the Engine.
This might be a good opportunity to bring him on to this stream to answer general audio related questions, and perhaps provide details where he plans to take the Engine audio in the future?
… The new date is set for April 21st, same time. Feel Better Zak!