Designing A Dynamic Horror Ambience

We're back with something different this time. Using FMOD, I came up with a very simple design for a dynamic ambient system which I thought I'd share with you all! You can do this in FMOD, WWise, Unity or Unreal Engine and change some of the steps I've taken to suit your own needs, its up to you, but hopefully this gives you some ideas of your own as to how you may approach your own ambiences.
Beyond Equilibrium: / revstudios1
Overriding vs. Blending snapshots:
www.fmod.org/q....
Audio for Unity 5: Survival Shooter (4/5) - Mixer Snapshots:
www.youtube.co....
Designing A Monster Roar With Balloons???:
• Designing A Monster Ro...
Please let me know if you enjoyed. :D
Need audio or music for your game? Feel free to email me at [e-mail]. Or follow me on twitter @henryscott0.
My Music: / henry-scott-12. .
My Site: www.scottgamesounds.com
Blog on mistakes I make as a freelance Sound Designer: www.scottgameso....

[@darrencook7168]

"I'll never throw that microwave again." Ties for best UA-cam quote ever and most unexpected UA-cam quote ever. Subscribed.

[@Fassislau]

Thank you a lot for your tutorials! They are quite useful! Very nice atmosphere you set up there! I loved the knife sounds!!

[@ScottGameSounds]

Thanks very much for the kind words Francisco, they were a favourite of mine as well.

[@KrissieFox]

I liked this quite a bit! I've not worked with FMOD before, but I've been fiddling with ambient sound design (using Audacity) since my college days and the features you mentioned in fmod sound pretty great! Seeing your creative process got me feeling inspired myself. :)

[@ScottGameSounds]

Wow thanks Christina! Glad I was able to get your creativity flowing!

[@arravolleyball]

Great tut!

[@TruthSurge]

Yeah, the knife effect was cool. Inside the track it sounded pretty creepy.

[@ScottGameSounds]

Thanks, that was favourite part about this too.

[@TruthSurge]

I've been just doing singing and guitar stuff for a few years on my YT channel but before was religion vids a lot. But I've been doing audio since like late 60s. I love tinkering with stuff like this. So, maybe I'll buy me some cheap digital recorder I can record some stuff like you've done. It's kind of a sense of pride rolling your own stuff, I guess. Always like exploring a new place. Thank ya.

[@DanielRomeros]

Again, great video Scott! And welcome back :) I still haven't figured out a way to have an ambience event playing in a very specific outlined area in unity. Like having the ambience play only in a section of the level that is a complex shape (not a sphere or box). For example, changing/blending between events in a large map game with completely different environments. You think you could make a video covering this?

[@ScottGameSounds]

Hey Daniel, always nice to read one of your comments. To be honest, what you described is something I'd like to learn as well. If I had to guess, I'd say those who use unity probably use multiple spheres and boxes to create whatever shape they need that collectively tells the engine to keep the correct ambience playing. If I find another more precise and efficient way however I probably will cover it. I found an interesting video that covers it a little bit about the subject recently: ua-cam.com/video/uI6RpXkm8LY/v-deo.html&index=1&list=LLraxrRno-ksSr9dU1oUxpog
Jump to about 16 mins in to hear about ambiences.

[@DanielRomeros]

Scott Game Sounds Yea man, it's always baffled me. Would be great to see you make a video covering this :D thanks for the reference?

[@TruthSurge]

Question: why randomize? As soon as you render it to a wav file, it's set, static, done. ? Why not just place the stuff where you think it sounds best? I could see if the game engine or sound engine did that but then you'd just load up the separate wav or whatever format files in the game and IT would mix them randomly, yes? So I'm confused why you are doing anything random inside a DAW.

[@ScottGameSounds]

The software I'm using in this video isn't a DAW, it's an 'Audio Engine' or 'Middleware' called FMOD. By integrating it with a game engine, I can take multiple WAV files and tell FMOD when and where I would like them to be triggered in real-time in a game. What you're listening to in the video won't be rendered into a single WAV file, but will be stored (along with data telling the files how they should be played) in what's called a 'Sound Bank', a folder which will be stored within a games data and called apon when this entire event is triggered in-game. So when the player hears the ambience, those files will be triggered randomly each time making the ambience slightly different every time it's heard.

[@TruthSurge]

ahhhhhh. Okay. So you have to use some software made for that and then it sort of spits out the goodies in a format that the game engine knows how to access and interpret while it's playing. So, it's like one little step beyond just a wav since you could get a little more variation out of it and hopefully less boring if the player has to stay there longer, etc. Okay, that makes sense. I have not used any of these audio programs like FMOD but after I commented I thought maybe this was some way to do it inside the game but wasn't sure. thanks!!

[@TigerGamerGirl]

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