Final Major Project - Sound

 Creating Ambience

    From the very beginning, I knew that I would really like to have some sort of sound effects in my scene. The reason for that being that I added sound to my previous project and I noticed that it was received very well. In my opinion, sound also adds quite a bit to the overall atmosphere of the game. 

    In this case, I wanted to create a very creepy, haunting atmosphere.. so what I had in mind was an overall ambient sound surrounding the whole scene and also doors creaking, ravens squeaking outside, etc. In order to create that ambience, I decided to use multiple different sounds that I downloaded from FreeSound - a website for free sound that people can download and use. 

https://freesound.org/browse/tags/sound-effects/

    I spend some time listening to different sounds that I found there and I downloaded quite a few in order to try them out and see whether they fit together. These are the ones that I settled on.. 

The first one is the overall ambience..

The second one is the creaking sounds..

The third one is the ravens squeaking outside.. 

    How I import sound in Unreal Engine is first, I make sure to download files that are the correct format - wav. Then, I create a separate folder in Unreal and I import all the sounds, and I make a sound cue from each one that I've imported. Usually, sound cues are important because that's where you can set up and edit your sound.. however, in this case I ended up not even using the sound cues, instead I just pulled up a couple of ambient sounds from Unreal and placed them in my scene, then I added the sound files to the physical material. 

Files and Sound Cues

Sound Cues Properties

 

PS: We add a Random because that's what going to make the noise play at random, if you don't want them to be linear

Ambient Sound in Unreal Engine

Adjusting the Sound

    Once I'm done adding the sound, what I did in this case was go into the ambient sound properties and adjust them For example, I wanted the sound to play at a specific volume in my scene and I did that for all three that I've added. The reason for that is that I wanted the ambience to be louder compared to the the creaking and the ravens, because while the ambience is going to surround the player, the rest of the noises are just going to be background noises. I also like to tick the Loop option in the object properties because that's what makes the sound loop - so no matter for how long the player chooses to stay and explore that level, the sound is always going to continue playing.