The Viking Village Part II: Fire and Water

In my last post I talked about what this scene needs. I did some research and creative story making to come up with the fictional town of Houlgate. Now that we know where we are, let’s build the first few sounds.

Thankfully Unity and FMOD have a robust knowledge base and tutorials that provide me with plenty of information (a lot of it that I don’t understand…). Again, I am starting with a Viking Village scene. This is widely known to Unity users because it is a free template. The scene comes functioning with the terrain, buildings, and props. It’s a terrific place to begin.

Sound Design

I decided to follow the video tutorial closely for my first few sounds. I have a nice library of VSTs and am building up a library of SFX. In a course I took years ago on Performance Art and Sound Design, we did a lot of field recordings and creating sound for installations using Metasynth. I’m also building up the library from some of the sounds available on Freesound.com.

The first sound I worked with was the sound of the torches. It’s a very simple loop and the tutorial was important in also teaching me about how phasing would occur. Each torch starts the audio in a random spot in the track in order to avoid phasing issues.

After preparing the sound in FMOD, I turned to Unity and placed the sound on the actual torch prop (then had to repeat for each torch). One of the great things about FMOD is how simple placing a sound is.

The next sound I added was the water. The water is an important feature of the town and in the fictional story of Houlgate.

I listened through a lot of different water sounds to find the right fit. The seas are calm in this scene, so I didn’t want heavy crashing waves. I ended up mixing the sound of a beach with the sound of an oar from a small row boat. Again, I added random modulation in pitch, time start and volume. I also added a tiny bit of reverb.

In Unity I created a cube that was pretty large to cover the beach front. I also added the FMOD sound emitter and selected my sound. Voila!

Wrong, it didn’t work that well. The issue was caused by the object being too far away. If I was on the dock I would hear the splashing, but if I was on the south or north beach, nothing. Eventually I decided I needed more sound sources. Honestly, I couldn’t come up with another way that would be natural enough and not have the sound heard in the village. I added two more sources of the water sound by the beaches.

Then, to add some variety, I got myself a sound of the echoing splashing water underneath a dock.

I created a box (called it dock water) and set it right over the dock. In FMOD I also added some reverb and cut down the dry output. This sound does not need to be loud, it just adds an extra component to the water scene when you’re on the docks. For the other dock, I just copy/paste the cube I had created and moved it over the other dock.

Note: I’m kind of an organize nerd, so I decided to create an empty item, called it water so that I had all of my water sounds in an organized folder.

Here’s a little video showing how the sound of the torches are triggered as I walk through the village and also the water on the beach and the docks. Warning that these sounds have not yet been mixed. (You may notice there are some assets visible that aren’t in the original template. You caught me, I did this video after I had completed a lot of work on this scene.)