Dracula's Castle Sound Design Project.
Another project I'm doing at the same time as my Behemoth covers project is a VR animation where you explore Dracula's Castle called NosVRtu, I'm also teaming up with another engineer, Justin Dando, to complete this project. NosVRtu is basically a game where you can go around the animated space of made up Dracula's castle setting and interact with objects in the environment, the aim audio wise is to have sound for each of the objects that can be interacted with as well as atmospheric sounds and music. Justin and I would like to record as much Foley sounds as possible that put be used for sound designs within the game but there are potentially some things we will need use samples for, such as Bats squeaking, large wooden doors opening, and other things that we are unable to produce effectively.
The VR environment has been create in a game engine software called Unreal Engine 4 or UE4, this is a link to there site for more information https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ , to get the audio integrated with UE4 we will need to use another piece of audio software called FMOD, which you can visit their website here https://www.fmod.com/ . I have worked with both of these software's previously on a similar style project, of which you can view my blog here for more details https://www.ryanvaneerde.com/blog/a-sound-design .
A basic summary for FMOD is a DAW that is specifically designed to be integrated with games software like UE4 and it's designed to process sound in a way that is beneficial to the implementation and triggering of sound events with in the game. For example, instead of having one long thunder and lightning track that repeats over and over becoming boring, repetitive, and irritating, you can setup a track inside of FMOD that can randomly plays multiple smaller clips and have each of those clips volume and pitch randomised as well to produce a completely random and more organic track than what would have otherwise been. This is one example of how FMOD can be used to make a game environment more interesting but there are many other things it can do as well.
We plan to have one main Foley recording session where we capture all of the sounds that we need, evaluate them after that, clean them up and make them usable, then see what is not sounding good or what extra sounds we have to produce. Justin will probably do the cleanup and implementation of the Foley sounds into FMOD where I will be composing and producing the atmospheric music track. Both of us will be doing the implementation of the FMOD sounds into UE4 as that will not be an easy task, it will take a lot of research by both of us to work out exactly how to do it seeing as the people we are working with are Animators and to Game Designers/Coders they might not know how to get the audio working in game. This is also something we can work out with them when the time comes.
The Foley sounds that we need to produce are as follows:
Chains (specifically sounds of chains being hit)
Fire SFX
Pots breaking
Books falling/dropping onto the ground
Candle sticks falling/dropping onto the ground
SFX for a book case moving to reveal a hidden room
A coffin lid sliding open
A human skull being dropped on the ground
Tapestries blowing rustling
Anything else we can think of on the day
Like the project I worked on previously I will be using sound tracks from the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent as references because I feel like the aesthetics are similar, I have also talked to one of the animators about this idea and he thinks it would suite it as well, I will be doing a blog about my composition process for it later.
I feel like this will be a very interesting project to work on, there will be some challenges with working out how to get the FMOD audio working inside of UE4 but I think it will turn out alright with enough research. It's good to be working on a project like this again and I am really excited by the VR environment the animators have created already, it will be interesting to see just how good the final product is with our audio in it as well.