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After the exhibition, I am thinking about what can be improved during the process of the whole project.
What I learned from the project:
Because I am mainly responsible for the integration of unity and Wwise projects using C# script, after the project, I’m glad that I’m more familiar with the code. Also, I never learned composing before, but this time I tried to make some music and I have learned more advanced implements and operations in Wwise.
What we can improve:
The first thing I think we can improve is about the time management. It took more than a month from our first discussion to finalizing and starting to work. This made us a little bit scrambled in the final stages because of the time management.
For the Wwise project, I think maybe more creative works could be done.
However, I want to thank all our team members. Especially our sound design friends, we spent many unforgettable nights together, for example, at 1am the day before the exhibition, we were rushing to do Wwise project in Alison house and were driven away by the security guards. And also our tutor Leo, he is so patient and so kind and helped us a lot. Without him, we can’t make the project so completed.
Dead leaves, dead flowers, ivy, soil, pipe, rice, tissue, crushed chili, tin foil, celery, bubble wrap, cornflakes, pill tin packaging, effervescent tablets, paper and paper box, electric toothbrush.
We used two kinds of microphones to compare the different recording effects, one is a dynamic microphone Beyer M201 and the other is a condenser microphone AKG C414B.
Plant growing sound: for the tree growing from soil to ground sound, we used some fibers and twisting them. The sound of snapping celery is used as the seed crackling and drilling out of the soil.
Leave sound: We used some sounds of rubbing plastic as the sound effect of leaves shaking.
Fire sound: To simulate the big fire, I use a combination of the sound of rubbing tin foil, crushing crisps, twisting bubble wrap, breaking off celery and small size impact and whistling wind sound to create more layers of a fire. By adjusting their frequencies and proportion to achieve a balance.
Birds fly：We used clothing and tissues to quickly wave and simulate the sound of bird wings flapping.
Rain：Each of us held a handful of rice and sprinkled it onto a cardboard from above while controlling the frequency to simulate different levels of rainfall.
Flames：We used the sound of squeezing plastic foam to simulate the sound of flames burning.
Collaborators: David Mainland, Runyao Li, Kunkun Wang, Yiran Wang
Many sound events follow the events in the unity scene, such as the sound of burning fire, raining , so most of the functions of playing sound are through “AkSoundEngine. PostEvent(“Event name”, gameObject) in C# inside the unity project.
RTPC in C#:
Because the change of our unity scene is not achieved by the timeline code, when using RTPC to change the ambient sound day and night, I cannot directly correspond the RTPC to time, so with the help of our tutor, we use “0” and “1 ” to correspond to “day” and “night” events.
VRController button sound：
We want to play the sound of the tree growing when the VR controller button is pressed, because pressing the button is the player’s own control of the growing process.
The code we used(But not worked, still not to debug):
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetButtonDown(“ButtonName”))
{
AkSoundEngine.PostEvent(“Play_Growth”, gameObject);
}
}
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetButtonUp(“ButtonName”))
{
AkSoundEngine.PostEvent(“Stop_Growth”, gameObject);
}
}
To match the style of our game, we decided the sound in this game will basically consist of real ambient sound and some synthesized sound effects and music.
For the recording part:
We have recorded some ambience sound in outdoors. Birds, insects, water.
Foley part:
Materials:
Dead leaves, dead flowers, ivy, soil, pipe, rice, tissue, crushed chili, tin foil, celery, bubble wrap, cornflakes, pill tin packaging, effervescent tablets, paper and paper box, electric toothbrush.
We used two kinds of microphones to compare the different recording effects, one is a dynamic microphone and the other is a condenser microphone.
Plant growing sound: for the tree growing from soil to ground sound, we used some fibers and twisting them. The sound of snapping celery is used as the seed crackling and drilling out of the soil.
Leave sound: We used some sounds of rubbing plastic as the sound effect of leaves shaking.
Fire sound: To simulate the big fire, I use a combination of the sound of rubbing tin foil, crushing crisps, twisting bubble wrap, breaking off celery and small size impact and whistling wind sound to create more layers of a fire. By adjusting their frequencies and proportion to achieve a balance.
Music part:
When making music, I decided to follow the storyline. When the tree is growing and at the experiencing stage, the music is soft and light. This style of music is designed to make players feel relaxed, because the scenes are also relatively healing. The second part of the music is for the fire part. When the tree is burns and gradually dies, the background music is a piece of tragic and sad melody. After that we will add some synthesizer sound effects according to the fire scene. The third part of music is used for the reborn part. Based on the principle of the “Wood Wide Web”. When a tree is dying, it passes its nutrients to other trees through its underground root system. So basically their cores are same. So the third music has the similar melody but with another instrument. The ending music is composed by piano and cello, also is a soft, relaxing major melody.
Code Part:
Many sound events follow the events in the unity scene, such as the sound of burning fire, raining , so most of the functions of playing sound are through “AkSoundEngine. PostEvent(“Event name”, gameObject) in C# inside the unity project.
RTPC in C#:
Because the change of our unity scene is not achieved by the timeline code, when using RTPC to change the ambient sound day and night, I cannot directly correspond the RTPC to time, so with the help of our tutor, we use “0” and “1 ” to correspond to “day” and “night” events.
VRController button sound：
We want to play the sound of the tree growing when the VR controller button is pressed, because pressing the button is the player’s own control of the growing process.
The code we used(But not worked, still not to debug):
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetButtonDown(“ButtonName”))
{
AkSoundEngine.PostEvent(“Play_Growth”, gameObject);
}
}
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetButtonUp(“ButtonName”))
{
AkSoundEngine.PostEvent(“Stop_Growth”, gameObject);
}
}
When the flowers decompose and float into the air, it will fly through a window and enter a room. Inside the window is a room for a child. There is a bouquet of flowers in child’s room. And the perspective will become third-person view and it will show some important stages in the character’s whole life. Like in his graduation ceremony, he will hold the flowers. When he has a baby, he bought his wife flowers. Or they take the flowers on a family picnic. And when he died, his children planted a seed in front of his grave, and then it begin a new cycle of life.
In this setting, the flower is not brought to the funeral at first, but are simply blown away by the wind.
I made some sound design piece for seed growing from the soil and crackling, ambience sound for sunny day with insects and birds, ringing bell in the classroom.
The first sound is making with ice crackling sound and rustle in the soil sound. I used FabFilter ProQ3 to adjust their frequencies and try to blend them together. The third sound is using the virtual musical instrument glockenspiel playing in Logic Pro.
Amber Zhang: hi, I think these sound examples what you made and designed are nice.
