Nice to meet you! I’m Grace Yen.
I am the Senior Product Manager for Audio on the Unreal Engine team at Epic Games. We recently came back from GDC 2023 where our team played an active role in many of the projects reveals at the State of Unreal 2023, as well as at sharing demos in the UE Audio booth on the expo floor. I wanted to recap it here as well for anyone that missed it or wanted to share what they saw to their team.
In addition, I wanted to thank all the people who took the time to stop by our booth and set up team meetings with us. It was so exciting to hear about your projects and how UE Audio can help you achieve your audio vision and direction.
So let’s jump into what we shared:
Electric Dreams: Audio Walk-Through
Electric Dreams is a real-time demonstration that showcases new features and updates that are part of the 5.2 Preview release, available via the Epic Games launcher and GitHub.
In the live demo at the State of Unreal, a photorealistic Rivian R1T all-electric truck crawls off-road through a lifelike environment densely populated with trees and lush vegetation built with Quixel Megascans, and towering craggy rock structures using Quixel MegaAssemblies.
Audio played a big part in the immersion of the demo. Here are a few highlights where the sound design really came to life:
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Soundscape ambient plugin generated a rich layered ambience with flora and fauna elements that were all procedurally spawned based on the density of the jungle using PCG (Procedural Content Generation, a new toolset released in UE 5.2).
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The sounds from the Rivian were procedurally generated using MetaSounds, with each tire on the vehicle being driven by a separate MetaSound.
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We used Convolution Reverb to simulate acoustic spaces for the caves, the distant jungle, and the Rivian interior cab.
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Audio Modulation was used to control the mix of the experience, including simulating occlusion when the camera goes into the Rivian interior cab or when the camera goes underwater.
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MIDI Device I/O support was leveraged during the run of the show to control the game’s mix in real time using our Audio Modulation plugin, during the stage demo. This tech-enabled the Audio Director backstage to accommodate the speaker’s dynamic performance on stage and make mix adjustments during the live presentation. For example, he increased the electric motor volume specifically when the MetaSound feature was called out, while also decreasing the jungle ambience when they were swapping out the Material on the Rivian.
We are currently working on an in-depth walk-through on how we pulled this off behind the scenes. Stay tuned for more information.
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) is a version of the Unreal Editor that can create and publish experiences directly to Fortnite. It has the flexibility to reach Fortnite’s huge audience of more than 500 million player accounts. For our Beta, we focused on enabling creators to quickly import their own audio, and provided an Audio Player Device to streamline adding audio to their projects, and setting volume, pitch, and attenuation. We also have features to enable the creator to specify the location the audio should be played, and which players in the game would hear it.
All UEFN experiences are powered by UE Audio. Here are a few examples you can check out: Deserted: Domination, Forest Guardian.
We have some docs to get you started, as well as some video tutorials. We will continue to bring the power of UE audio features into UEFN in future releases.
AudioLink for Wwise
In case you missed our updates from GameSoundCon 2022, we are pleased to announce AudioLink, which enables your project to run UE Audio alongside middleware. This means our creators can use features from the tools that work best for their project needs—they no longer have to choose one over the other.
Our collaboration with AudioKinetic on their AudioLink for Wwise plugin continues, and they have recently shared this blog that walks through the experience of using their plugin.
We have also started collaborating with Firelight Technologies on their AudioLink for FMOD plugin. Stay tuned for updates.
RandDrums
RandDrums is a demo that features a beautifully inspiring 3D interface connected to a MetaSound graph to generate random drum patterns to help our creators explore drum patterns quickly with user input.
A single MetaSound powers RandDrums. With it, you can:
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Select random samples pulled from a table of wav assets to give the sequence a more “natural feel.”
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Adjust the gain and tempo, and apply side chaining (so that the snare lowers when the kick plays).
The pattern repeats itself to create grooves using seeded randomization in the MetaSound graph.
Visit the RandDrums tutorial on the Epic Developer Community for more information on the demo.
Plugin Demo
Creating an open and extensible environment is one of our key goals. This is one of the reasons that we have been releasing our key features as plugins. In fact, MetaSounds itself is a plugin, and recent additions to our technology offering such as Soundscape, a solution for procedurally generating ambient sound, have been shared as a plugin. It is not “the only way” to do ambience and we welcome you to extend what we have done, or even build your own if needed.
Community Spotlight : Sweejtech’s MIDI Plugin
We are excited to see what the community has been building and wanted to share some work Sweet Justice has been doing through their SweejTech game audio tech division. Their MIDI plugin enables you to choose a MIDI device, add the interface to a MetaSound, and use a MIDI device to control it. At our GDC booth, they demonstrated a really cool drum machine with melody and bass lines that you could control and modify in the editor in real-time. See their demo to learn more.
Community Spotlight : Mix Universe
Mix Universe is a musical sandbox game that delivers a beautiful audio-visual experience and music creation environment. Every sound you hear in the game is happening in real time, with a single, instanced MetaSound. The music is synchronized to visuals using Unreal Engine’s real-time synesthesia spectral analysis and loudness metering. The creator, Chris Zuko, has been sharing his journey in making this game. Chris was a speaker at Epic’s sponsored GameSoundCon track and also at GDC 2023. Here is the GameSoundCon presentation.
Spatial Audio Demystified Talk Hosted by Dolby
We continue our collaboration with Dolby on their Dolby Atmos Plugin for Unreal Engine, which provides access to enhanced Dolby spatial audio processing for game development. This plugin places and moves individual sounds all around the listener in three dimensions, even overhead, with pinpoint precision and realism.
Aaron McLeran, our UE Audio Engine Director, was invited as a special guest to deliver a talk hosted by Dolby, entitled Spatial Audio Demystified. Spatial Audio is a long-standing hot topic in-game audio and beyond, with many new techniques claiming to revolutionize game audio. Often described with confusing and contradictory jargon, it can be hard to discern what is fact and what is fiction. To demystify and bring more clarity to the field, this talk gives a broad introduction to spatial audio from first principles to more advanced techniques.
Wrap Up
That’s it for now. We look forward to sharing updates again soon.