Weapon Sounds [Unreal Development Kit]

Here's a video demonstrating some more sound design and implementation I did within the Unreal Development Kit. 

My goal was to design new sounds for the shock rifle that include the following: 

-Picking up the shock rifle

-Picking up shock rifle ammo

-Switching TO the shock rifle from another weapon

-Switching FROM the shock rifle to another weapon

-Main shock rifle fire (x2)

-Main shock rifle fire layer

-Alternate shock rifle fire

-Alternate shock rifle fire layer

-Alternate shock rifle fire impact

-Alternate shock rifle fire explosion

-Alternate shock rifle fire travel

I designed the sounds using a few simple loops and processing. For more of the firing/explosion sounds, I used a combination of doors slamming, air pressure blasts, handguns and shotguns firing, and reverb. Alongside these basic sounds, I layered a lot of electricity and static noises, to make a more appropriate shock rifle feel. Once I finished layering sounds, I boosted each of them in volume a bit. I used careful compression to give the concussive sounds more of a transient.

To implement the sounds in the UDK gameplay environment to be interactive, I utilized sound cues. A sound cue is essentially a submix/subgroup of a song (or multiple sounds) that allow you to add tools to further control the resulting sound. The SoundCues I designed are pretty simple. The shock rifle/ammo pickup sounds and switching sounds are just a triggered sound that play when you pick up either the shock rifle, its ammo, or switch weapons. The alternate shock rifle fire travel layer is a short clip (roughly under 1 second) that loops until the projectile collides with a surface, which triggers the alternate shock rifle impact sound (you may notice that you don't hear the sound of the alternate projectile travelling - for some reason, it would refuse to play whenever I did a screen video!). In case you want a nice electric firework show, you can always use the main fire to shoot the alternate fire projectile, causing it to explode and trigger the alternate shock rifle explosion sound. 

Now, for the [slightly] more complicated sound cues - the firing sound. The main firing sound is composed of three sounds - the main firing sound, a variation of the main fire, and a layer of electrostatic like effects. While throwing in a single firing sound would have sufficed, that would have been boring and obviously repetitive, so I used some modulation. Modulation is a tool within the sound cue that allows you to randomly vary the pitch and volume of a sample in order to give you more audio options from a single sound.  In the case of the main shock rifle fire sound, I began the sound cue with a random selection between the two main fire layers. The result of this was combined with the main fire layer. This was then modulated, and the shock rifle fire is heard!

Thanks for checking out my blog! If you have any questions or would like more info, feel free to check out my contact tab at the top.

-Matthew Morrison