Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 113 voice from character to character. With that being the case, we can't just hard process with the idea of, "hey, you have a helmet on, now you sound like you're talking through a radio helmet," or "you have a cloth across your face, so it's slightly muffled." With this helmet system, now we can dynamically say, "You spawned with this helmet, so add this processing to your entire dialog set." For characters such as Rafa the Exo soldier, his default, he has a helmet on. The players can take that off anytime, and his voice will then be unaffected. Later on, there are helmets where the player can put on a whole robot head, and it changes how all their dialogue sounds, which happens in real time. Having dynamic systems really helped us on this game. EM: Jesse, what was the role of technical sound design and engineering for the audio team on this title? JL: My role is pretty fun because I'm at the forefront of trying to understand this game. The first part of my role is figuring out how to facilitate what the sound designers want to do, including the pillars that Brian defined, and make the workflow really easy. The goal is to make it so our sound designers aren't fighting the tools to get sounds into the game. To that end, there were a few key tools that were necessary. One was making positioning really clear so that the motion of objects through the space was really good. It's not just a matter of attaching audio to enemies—we had to figure out how to handle projectiles and particle systems. I worked with one of our programmers, Bob D, who wrote a really excellent Niagara integration. With the Niagara particle systems, I was able to handle a ton of stuff that previously was unattainable. From beams that arc from weapons and enemies to the player, to swirling fireballs that surround an enemy, or massive shock waves of fire or ice that shoot out of a boss. Now you can hear those because of the Niagara stuff. It can come at you and run past you. If you're in a surround environment, you can hear that stuff whoosh by and it feels really cool. Many of our animations are shared for a family of enemies. We had to create a system of sound tags in order to create a map of actions that belongs to certain animations. However, when that system is applied to a specific enemy, we needed it to use certain sounds for specific behaviors. So that way, we'd be able to be a lot more flexible and responsive to what the sound designers are making. If they make an enemy that's the size of a dog and then scale that up to the size of a house, then the footsteps, attacks, and vocalizations all need to scale with it. With how our sound tag system and Foley system work, we're able to assign the correct scaling of audio to everything. It saves us time, because you only have to tag things once. We had to make sure everything understood our new elemental system. It was important to make that was as easy as possible to use so that people can just plug in one event. On the Wwise side, it has a set of switches that clarifies "this is what this is." EM: How important is co-dev to you all as an audio team, and where do you rely on resources like that? MP: There are some outsource sound designers and teams that we use to build sound palettes and also do field recording. We have great relationships with them, and we lean into those things Recording the sound of a road flare in a tub of water for Borderlands 4. Brian Fieser recording sounds for Borderlands 4.