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[Synthack]

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[psynical]

why don't you download UE Engine and find out for yourself if that has the tools needed to do this? And given that most modern video games are 3D enviro with sound, it's obviously possible to do.
So what exactly is your question/request here? It sounds like you're hoping that someone would build this from scratch for you? Are you imagining this wouldn't take 1000's of hours and cost million$ to create?

[sjm]

I don't know how easy adding your own convo reverb would be, but UE is easy to learn without any programming knowledge and you can do most of the basic stuff without needing to code at all. So just download it and play around, watch the tutorials etc.

[whyterabbyt]

FWIW, Im not seeing convolution or physical modelling in the list of MetaSounds nodes

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US ... enceGuide/

Also confirmed in UE5, itself.

A quick read of the 'New Audio Features' documentation at https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US ... udioInUE5/ gives me the impression that MetaSounds isnt intended to cover spacialisation of audio events, its a new DSP graph for generating those events, so their existing spacialisation system is used as is?

[vurt]

stereo pair/sledgehammer/wall

you can always find someone local who needs a wall taking out

wall is not a euphemism for partner or anything

[whyterabbyt]

Most comparable alternative, btw, might be PD or CSound in Unity, via libpd or cabbage respectively.

[Synthack]

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[sjm]

I shall, i need to learn this anyway for some film project ideas. I’ve seen people using it for designing virtual backgrounds with their green screen setups and it looks pretty cool. I’m glad it doesn’t necessarily require a person to tackle C++ to get started!

I think that if you are into film, this is more or less what the future is going to be, so getting ahead of the curve is a good idea. UE5 looks like it's going to add a whole bunch of extra features that will be great for creating video content too. Even now, you can theoretically do entire scenes/movies with it. There's a video sequencer that I believe was originally designed for cut scenes in games, but you can render out videos using the timeline to move props and actors around etc. You can also control the camera(s), and it's all pretty intuitive if you're coming from a DAW world - it's basically event automation in a timeline.

I used UE (and a bunch of other tools) to create a music video semi-recently. It took me about 2 weeks to create, and I had never used UE before. It might not be the most amazing video ever, and my visual artistic skills are pretty much non-existent, but it's definitely a lot more interesting than a bouncing EQ for 3 minutes and better than anything I could have created elsewhere.

So I think usability is pretty amazing and the tutorials for UE are for the most part pretty good, both third party and from Epic. A few are/were slightly out of date, especially regarding the sequencer for movies. But the tricky part isn't really using a timeline, it's getting objects to animate, getting the lighting right etc. etc. The more experience you have with 3D graphics, the easier you'll find it, but you don't need to be a wizard.

[pixel85]

IR reverb is kina like in a DAW: you're adding it as an effect Insert/Send. If you want to do fancy reverberation then you'll need Wwise + plugins to get physical material/surface reflections etc. Which you can use as trials but be aware that full licenses for plugins are veeeeery expensive.

Metasound is like a modular synth with a graphic interface - to make it closer to Blueprint visual programming. It's not an environment to design Foley. You can add effects and modulation there, yes. But if you want to have a real Foley sound, you have to put recorded audio there. Metasound has basic oscillators and filters and at this point, they're not really capable to synthesize realistically-sounding Foley sounds. But are great for all kinds of sci-fi/unrealistic stuff.
There's no physical modelling. You have a basic subtractive synthesis.
If you want to make real-time interactive audio, you still have to use Blueprints to connect audio with 3D assets.

Metasound like UE5 is still in alpha. It's a very early thing (even that concept is not new). It will take years before Metasound will start to really shine (even devs admit that).

Ok the big question is WHY when someone could just go in a warehouse and record this stuff for real?

Because in the example of video games, interactive experience, a designer can't predict all possible combinations of interactions and player choices. Designers must think (besides performance issues) about many possibilities. Then use a variety of methods: from a single 1 sfx to very complex logic that contains a lot of sfx.
Everything depends on the contest. In an example of a wall being destroyed, there are two options:

- wall destruction always has exactly the same behaviour (let's say that flying and falling bricks are animated in an editor) - in that case, you can use 1 sfx (+variations).

- wall destruction is different and is depending on eg. what is the force of let's say, fired bullet, where the bullet hit the wall, what is the speed of flying brick and the force with which a brick hit another object. In this case, there can be several or even thousands of combinations. In that case, it would be ridiculous for a designer to record sfx for every possible combination of full wall destruction. This is the moment where programming tricks are used like adding sfx for each brick hit etc.

It's a very wide topic and learning sound design in a 3D environment is a task for many years (it's actually unlimited time due to constantly evolving technology).

[Synthack]

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[sjm]

That’s cool you used it for a music video! Actually I thought of maybe doing the same thing as well just as a learning experiment.

Given that the average tune is ~3 minutes long, it's probably not a bad idea. Long enough that you can have a couple of different scenes, or camera angles or whatever, not long enough that it'll take you forever to create.

If you're interested, here's the aforementioned video:


I didn't create the models, they're either free assets from the marketplace or free models that I imported into UE. I did create the fire and smoke effects myself though, as well as the materials that aren't used by the assets (water, terrain).

The main character's walking animation was created in DAZ Studio, as well as the standing pose. There's a little jump in the animation that I didn't spot until it was too late, but whatever, it's a PoC more than anything. The character is superimposed on the scenes as a separate layer - I wanted it to have a bit of a surreal dream sequence quality, so I wasn't bothered about animating her in UE itself. MetaHuman Creator looks really interesting for being able to create your own humans complete with animations going forwards though. It's in early access right now, but here's hoping the final version is as promising as it looks.

While it's by no means perfect, the fact that I could knock that up in 2 weeks with zero prior knowledge really speaks to how intuitive and easy to pick up the software is. You can load up audio files in UE too, so syncing the action to the audio is relatively simple.

The way I approached this was to render out the individual scenes as separate videos, and stitch them together in Vegas. In theory you could do the entire sequence as one long video, but I don't feel that the sequencer timeline is ideal for that. It's great for shorter sequences in a single location though (again, similar to game cut scenes). Some of the visual effects are made in ZGameVisualizer Editor that comes with FL Studio, and it's also what I used to superimpose the character onto the scenes.