Post.4. NO ONE LIKES ANIMATION NOTIFIES

No sound designer enjoys tagging animations with annoying notifies. There must be another way, right? In this blog I show how, in Unreal, I created a basic procedural foley system for a third person template project completely in blueprints. It works well on a project with only a few animations, but will it work in a game with multiple animations? Absolutely not. It would have to be developed further.

The system I put together can be broken down to four elements.

 

Footstep.

• Foot hits a surface event. (Left & Right)
• Foot leaves a surface event. (Left & Right) 
• What physical material is under each foot when the foot hits and leaves a surface.

Player movement.

Setting a switch dependent on if the player is.

• Standing 
• Walking
• Running
• Grounded
• Jumping
•  Falling

Player Falling from height.

• What physical material the player will land on when they are falling.

Foley

• Running Upper body foley event
• Running Lower body foley event
• Jumping event
• Landing event
• Falling event
• Sprint Start event
• Sprint Stop event

I won’t cover integrating wwise in unreal or how to set up physical materials in this blog. There are plenty of tutorials out there for that. I also won’t go through setting up Wwise, creating your events or setting up your switches, there is again a lot of material out there on that.

 You will see when looking through this “how to” that when setting up my blueprints I use a lot of custom events. I do this to keep all the wwise events in one place which helps with the project management… and my OCD.

(Annoyingly, the only way to get this info into a blog post was to screen shot it and put it in as pictures. Upside is you can zoom in).

And for now, that it!

Yes, there is no set up for an idle but hopefully from what I have gone over you should be able to work out how to trigger an event for that.

If it’s something you wanted to do, you could, using a similar set up the footsteps, quite quickly put together a system for hand pats and even body falls.

For more complicated games, the foley system could be improved to use bone rotation speed, which would help with different movement types.

Maybe In my next post I will investigate that set up, but for now, I hope you have found this basic set up useful.

Pete