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What's the approach when you design the engine sounds of a ship from a particular manufacturer?

TL;DRPhil Peers-Smallwood explains that engine sounds are designed from the manufacturer's identity and the ship's role, via a style guide and layered, input-driven sounds tuned in Wwise, so each brand and ship category sounds appropriate.

Phil Peers-SmallwoodLead Sound Designer

Well, I'll take that one then. So what we'll do is we'll look at the manufacturer and see what the brief is about those. Are they aligned with military? Are they more aligned with alien tech? Are they cheaply made? Are they well made? Then we'll look at the ship specifically. Is it a fighter, a hauler? Is it meant to be focused on mining? Anything in particular to that? Then we'll have a creative kickoff and pull in references from other ships that we have and see where there's any parity and stuff. And we'll generate a style guide and then start generating source, look at references, and then start to implement them and then tune them in game. So we'll get them in Wwise, because a lot of the sound effects only really come together at runtime in the ship. So when you're flying a ship, it's kind of like you're playing a musical instrument in a way, because we'll implement all these different layers and one-shots, but it's actually the ship's movement and input that triggers all these. And we have different RTPCs that will attenuate sounds in pitch and volume, high pass, low pass and effects based on the action, the input from the ship. So yeah, at a high level, we go: this manufacturer typically does military ships, so everything sounds really robust and, say, aggressive. And this ship is a fighter, so everything needs to be sleek and fast and not too bulky. And then start tailoring the sounds to that. And that doesn't just pertain to thrusters. That could be anything like moving parts, ambiences, any kind of component work and stuff like that. So yeah, we want to try and establish a brand identity for each manufacturer, and then with each category of ship, make sure it sounds appropriate. So you've not got a fighter that sounds like a giant whale of a cargo ship, and vice versa.

Star Citizen Live›Audio Team Roundtable·
Published on this date.16 Apr 2021
EpisodeAudioShips