Hi everyone! After publishing my article on mediatech ventures, here you can find a more detailed version of my personal top 10 tips to working with Wwise and Unreal Engine 5.
Tip #1: Organize Your Hierarchy Structure
A well-organized project is key! Build a solid hierarchy structure using a proper naming convention for your files into the project, categorize sounds with names and color-coding, that would help you easily navigate into the project and quickly find what you need.
Tip #2: Reach Out to a Community to Ask for Help
Game sound designers are a nice community of people that help each other solve problems, give advice, share knowledge, etc. In my personal experience, the community has always been a great resource for problem-solving and inspiration. Here are some links to a few!
- For Italian speakers: GAIN - Game Audio Italian Network
- For international folks: Wwise Wwizards & Wwitches; Airwiggles Community; World Game Audio Map
Tip #3: Check Out Audiokinetic's Free Resources
Read the Audiokinetic blog and watch their Twitch channel / YouTube: These 2 are other powerful resources, full of articles and videos of professionals sharing their projects, workflows and tricks. There is a lot to learn from them.
Tip #4: Mind Your SoundBanks
If you’re working with SoundBanks in Wwise, you don’t want to mess them up! SoundBanks that are too heavy will take more time to be loaded from the game engine. Dividing them into categories, loading and unloading them when required will substantially improve performance. Here are some links to help you get started:
Tip #5: Randomize Assets
Randomization is your friend; Randomize pitch, volume, the triggering time of a sound - everything you need to make the game sound as natural as possible & enhancing immersion.
Tip #6: Recycle Your Assets
Recycling your assets is a good way to save resources and time; sometimes you can just change pitch, add some in engine effects, play with filters to make footsteps sound bigger or smaller, for example, and use them for different creatures in the game.
Tip #7: Use MultiPosition and Radial Emitters
Another way to improve performance is using MultiPosition, which allows you to place a sound effect in different positions in the map (for example, torches, waterfalls) as many times as you want without using too many resources, since it will always count as 1 physical voice playing. MultiPosition combined with Radial Emitters is very useful to simulate volumetric sound sources (such as lakes or shorelines).
Tip #8: Use Convolution
Reverb is essential to the immersion of a game. Since all sound in a game has been pre-recorded, they need worldization. In my opinion, adding Convolution Reverbs in our scene would give more credibility to the sound in the scene and enhance the immersion, especially to reproduce the acoustics of outdoor spaces, non-standard rooms (containers, parking lots, etc.), or cathedrals.
Tip #9: Use Built-in Game Parameters
Built-in game parameters (Distance, Azimuth, Elevation, Emitter Cone, Obstruction, Occlusion, Listener Cone, Diffraction, Transmission Loss) can be very useful to drive real-time parameters for the 3D spatialization of game objects, enhancing the mix and immersion of the game. For example, parameters such as Azimuth (the angle between the listener and the game object projected on the horizontal plane) and Elevation are essential to estimate the position of a creature you want to avoid during an exploration phase or that of an NPC during a multi-combat session.
Tip #10: Be Creative
Last but not least, creativity. Be creative while designing your systems, think outside the box, explore the thousands possibilities that these tools are offering you. And don’t be afraid to try and experiment while researching.
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