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Writer's pictureSteve

Creating Dynamic Ambiences in Wwise



Research


Ori and the Blind Forest


Ori features ambiences grounded in reality but incorporates supernatural elements that drive the narrative. Earth, wood, and stone help convey a tactile world.


The ambiances help drive quiet scenes, in comparison the action sequences are big, Andrew Lackey commented that “We needed to be hyper-realistic/naturalistic and psychologically spooky” (Andersen, MAKING THE MAGICAL SOUND OF ORI AND THE BLIND FOREST, 2015) and later commented on the dynamics of the game.


“In short, my aim was to create a highly dynamic and fitting sonic world for Nibel and all of these environments, characters, and events, but also stretch as far as we could the peaks and valleys of dynamics, detail, humor, spookiness, naturalism.”



This is particularly noticeable in act three of the game where the majority of the chase scene takes place in a storm, this is in contrast to the very sedate beginning of the game.



Kena: Bridge of Spirits


Kena: Bridge of Spirits

When playing through Kena I notice a similar approach in sound design to Ori. Wind & tree rustles are layered throughout the forest sections, many of the interaction effects have a glassy twinkly feel, stone or bamboo layers. Each section of the forest is created to have a different feel, Japanese-influenced bamboo and wood chimes help to enforce the storytelling here.


Ember Labs mentioned influences by Lord of the Rings, Blade Runner, and the unique and whimsical animated worlds of Studio Ghibli. (WebbyAwards, 2022)



LOTR/Hobbit


Lord of the Rings/ The Hobbit

Based on the interview with Ember Labs, I made a point of revisiting the full LOTR epic, there are several notable areas I thought would be useful for approach.


Moria –deep wind on scenes with wide open spaces, distant orcs, and general movement within the cave. For example, the odd fall of rock with reverb accentuates the size and material.


A great video is the behind-the-scenes on the full trilogy (Design, 2019) explaining the process and approach with an interesting section on wind and its role in storytelling.


Sea of Theives



Sea of Thieves

Larger than-life sound so the team used a lot of real sounds and layered hyper-reality to make things bigger.


I attended a talk at the Game Audio Symposium with the lead audio designer about the approach to ambience and changes with the game states



Jaws

Although not a similar genre I’ve always loved The Buoy Scene at the beginning of this movie, initially, there’s obvious noises of a shark attack however once the attack is over all that can be heard is the calming sound of waves and the sound of the bell from the buoy. This really helps to notate the calm after the storm.




God of War 5 Ragnarök – Drunk Thor & Atreus Start Fight in Asgard Pub

· Non diegetic music

· Reverbrative room

· Torches can and fires can be heard.




Avatar - The Way of Water

Many layers of water, in fact this is over the top during the film especially at night.



Other influences:



Game Audio Symposium

I attended many talks this day however I found “Tonal vs Noise” Cameron Gillies - Sound Designer - Formosa Interactive UK particularly useful. In previous tutor feedback its often been remarked about my use of noise. I was able to incorporate soothe2 to help combat this when needed.

Common Takeaways


· Give environment characters, just as important as player characters.

· Storytelling elements and layers although every sound should tell a story.

· Tactile, Hyper-Realistic with a Realistic backbone.



Creativity

To generate ideas, I used Davinci Resolve to create a linear video and moved this into Cubase along with a single with all the provided assets, this helped build a sketch with the provided sounds quickly and later this will be useful to inform the team of a first iteration.


Using my own sound library, I started to add sounds I felt worked and removed others that didn’t fit. All sounds used are referenced at the end of the commentary.


Approach


Beach

For the beach I wanted to incorporate elements from research, I used layers of moving water ranging from waves to trickles and babbles.


There’s coastal wind and natural wildlife here, the island inland would also be audible.


There’s a ship incorporated in the picture along with a town, so I wanted to hear the sound of water lapping on wood and how the natural sounds contrast with the sound of occupants that live there.



Forest

As with Ori and Kena I wanted a very organic sound with wind, tree rustles and slight rock movement. As the forest is magical, I drew on the presence of the ancient ruins so I added my own whispers and processed sounds with broken glass for supernatural layers.


I added many layers of forest sounds and baked a lot of the reverb into the sound files varying in depth, this helped to give an illusion of depth.



Monster Dungeon

For the monster lair, I wanted to make the dungeon as alive as the creature that lives there, there’s a low airy drone and some breathing sounds that mix with the wind, and just like LOTR I added rock movement and an impulse response the dragon huffs deep within the dungeon to create the illusion of depth.



Tavern

For the Tavern I thought about size and material. Using an impulse response of a commissioner’s billiard room I was able to get room tone and build from there. In much of the research, many had an audible wind outside the building, and I wanted to incorporate this. As there’s wind the building would creak and move.


As well as my initial thought process I also wanted to incorporate my own recorded sounds. I made a point of visiting the countryside to collect real-world sounds and practice field recording.



Capture

Here I was able to capture lots of useful ambience beds with birds and spot recordings of breaking wood and twigs.


Metadata

Once home, I used the Universal category system (Nielsen, Drury, & Paquin, 2020) to help find these sounds later.


i.e. AMBFarm_TreeRustle_DistantBirds




Field Recording Post-processing.

With a lot of the wood ambiences, I had to cuambiancesep sounds and bass, this allowed me to just take wind sounds and rustle of leaves that I ended up using in the project.



Recorded Twigs

I ended up using these sounds in the forest but added a lot of processing and cut out a lot of noise using Sotthe2 Delta mode, this sounded like otherworldly insects, so I added these as spot layers within the forest


For the Magical Forest I was able to be pretty creative using a number of synths, Including Falcon 2 and Phase plant.





Technical & Implementation

I really wanted to play around with Wwise and understand some of the features outside of the formative task, with that in mind I used a number of reverbs and delays inside Wwise.




I also got an understanding of how levels of each audio are affected by game states, in hindsight I would have thought more about using less sound files here and recycle some of the used ones in several environments. I was able to do this with the wind in the forest and tavern.



The use of RPTC, allowed me to create time of day for each environment rather than just the Tavern, along with understanding how I could control each random container. Informed how I could make the audio scene more dynamic.





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