Evaluation

This module has guided me into understanding the different recording equipment that can be used, techniques and advice for the best way of recording my sounds and, editing them and exporting them into UDK.

I found the zoom recorder to be a very good device in capturing audio with just its own microphone, at least for the sound effects I needed for my UDK level. I’ve had to spend as long as half an hour for capturing some of my audio such as the elevator due to patiently waiting for the cleanest recording without unwanted background noise. For my droplets audio I originally considered having a linear clip of random drops in one file, but during the editing I remembered the randomiser in UDK so I decided to split the drops into separate files.

Most of my editing for my sounds was removing the left over background noise and altering the sound to match my intended sound. Hiss reduction was the most commonly used effect to help with the background noise and worked most of the time, I’ve used adaptive noise reduction on some areas of my audio.

The acid sound is the one sound which I had used from a royalty free audio site due to the lack of time I had to record a sizzling sound, I used a sound of egg sizzling and then used distortion to alter the sound to feel more.

Sound in UDK

With the final sounds exported as WAVE 16bit audio files they are now ready to be imported into the Unreal Development Kit, when an audio files is directly imported it will show up as a wave node file which is the raw original files, this can then be placed into a Wave cue file which allow extra editing within UDK such as adding a randomiser or a looper.

When sound nodes are added to the level scene in UDK the attenuation can be edited which alters the radius of the audio's volume, the max radius alters the sound's maximum hearing range, if the player is outside of this they will hear nothing, there is then the min radius which is where the player will hear the full aloud volume of the audio, the area between the two radius's is the audio's range.

With the elevator sounds edited I resulted with doors opening, doors closing, elevator moving and a beep as audio files for my game. With the Matinees set up to animate the doors in the Kismet I link the audio files to the appropriate events and actions in order to make the sounds play at the right events, since the button for the elevator is the beep I told the kismet to trigger the beep to play whenever the button is triggered.

My Sounds

Here is the list of sounds I decided to create and add into my game include and how I created them

Acid Drops, This was made by a recording of a tap dripping in a bathroom
Acid Sizzling, This was created distorting a pre recorded sound clip of an egg sizzling
Elevator Moving
Elevator Doors opening
Elevator Doors closing
These were created from the College Elevator in action, then trimmed and split into separate files.
Elevator Beep, This was created from the button from the College elevator.

The elevator sounds required editing a lengthy collection of recordings to pick out the best suited, the use of Audition's hiss remover to reduce most of the background noise in these clips.

 For the droplets of “water” I had a recording of several drop sounds which I split into individual files per drop, these files I imported into my UPK and turned them into a randomised cue by using the random node in the soundCue editor to make each drop random, I also added a delay between each drop to space out the time between each one.

 

Audio Equipment

We had a tutorial on how to use some of the best audio capturing equipment which will be used for recording audio effects for games. The most important device we were introduced to is the zoom recorder which is captures and stores audio onto an SD card. It has two ports at the bottom for connecting high quality recording hardware for different ways of capturing sound.


The SM58 is a microphone attachment that works in an omni fashion as it captures audio that is around the microphone, the SM87 is similar but is slightly more directional as it captures the majority of audio directly up above from the mic. Both are used primarily for capturing voice.

The rifle microphone and the shotgun microphone are used for capturing sound at further distances while ignoring the majority of sound out of the directed radius, the difference between the two is the rifle’s directed radius of audio capture is smaller than the shotgun.
 

Headphones can also be connected to hear playback without the Zoom Recorder’s internal speaker. it's key to remember to press the record button twice to start recording, the first time prepares the recorder to take sound and the second to begin recording it as data onto it's memory card

Adobe Audition

The program Adobe Audition is a sound editing software kit that allows users to alter imported sound.
When audio is imported into Audition the interface displays two green spikes on a line which shows the sound level and volume, typically there are two as most audio clips is normally stereo which means two channels of sound, mono means one.

dB is decibels and is the measurement in a sound's loudness, this can be manipulated via the adjust amplitude, other basic effects that can be added include fade in and fade out by dragging the corners of the interface making a softer beginning and ending.

We experimented with some of the effects within Audition to alter the interview sound clip in various ways, in the effects rack we tried out one of the presets called Radio Announcer Voice which makes the clip crack, I further edited it by trimming out the silent seconds of the clip to make the speed go faster.

Sounds for game engines

As we are working on our gaming module we need to come up with suitable sound for our level designs. As one of the key elements wanted for our level is an elevator I decided to look for a YouTube video of an elevator in action.
I placed it into Audition and started with trimming off the audio before and after the lift in operation.