Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
Trailblazing Combat BY EARL SCIONEAUX, III Smart Game Audio Pipelines for Creative Freedom "You never work for the machine, the machine works for you." –QUINCY JONES ver the years, I've found that useful improvements to sound design pipelines sometimes come from shifting the fundamental way we think about them. The ability to spot friction, question defaults, and try unexpected approaches can unlock powerful new possibilities. The three examples I'll discuss here are a bit unusual, but each is the natural result of looking at familiar problems in unfamiliar ways. These aren't magic bullets, of course, and what works for one game may be a terrible solution for another. They were, however, all spun from a common thread: off-loading mechanical tasks to machines, freeing designers to focus on more innovative pursuits. My hope in sharing these is that they may inspire a similar mindset in others. Runtime Motion Foley Early in my game career, I spent hours hand-placing cloth movement, metal jingles, and other elements to bring characters to life. It worked but it didn't scale. Every time an animation or a character changed, I'd be back in the timeline, tweaking and resyncing. At some point, I realized there had to be a better way. That led me to a different approach: runtime motion Foley. Instead of treating gear and clothing sounds as things to hand-tailor in post, I made them systemic. Using simple parameters like the linear velocity of select bones (and later, angular velocity of bone rotation; shout out to Braeger Moore for that enhancement), I created a system that took those inputs, did some simple math, and used the resulting values to modulate the volume of long looping beds of cloth or gear movement audio. This gave us believable, reactive movement sound layers that responded to character motion in real time. Of course, we built in override options in case we wanted to switch to more traditional methods for important moments like cinematics. Bespoke work could still shine. However, in a game with tens of thousands of animations, character sounds for the bulk of the game had to be handled in a way that didn't monopolize audio designers' time. There were other, more prominent things that needed creative focus. This method didn't just save time. It paid off in ways we didn't anticipate. As new animations rolled in, the system just worked. No one had to scramble to add Foley to last-minute changes because the system already responded in real time. That ended up being a huge win during the pandemic, when our production pipeline was upended and new animation assets were arriving extremely close to deadline. Having a system that made character movement sound believable amid shifting production circumstances bought us time, sanity, and the opportunity to focus our resources on more creative design elements. Granular Synthesis for Time-Flexible Design One of the biggest inefficiencies in traditional sound O 106 M PS E . O R G