Wwise Tour 2016 - CD Projekt Red Witcher (2 of 6) - Ambience
Game: The Witcher - Wild Hunt
Wwise Tour 2016, Warsaw, Poland. The Witcher - Wild Hunt, by CD Projekt Red. Presented by Krzysztof Lipka, Senior Sound Designer and Sound Team Coordinator, Pawel Daudzward, Senior Sound Designer, Marcin Przybylowicz, Music Director and Composer and Colin Walder, Senior Audio Programmer. Wwise by Audiokinetic. https://www.audiokinetic.com/
Just before playing some examples of dynamic ambiance, Paweł presents the initial goals for ambiance in the game, such as having:
Enough content to fill this huge open world
Sound variations to avoid repetition
Mechanisms to mimic real world
Control mixing on the fly for storytelling purposes
Straightforward implementation
Paweł then shows how their global weather system has been implemented in Wwise using Blend Containers reacting to wind intensity parameters, rain, and thunderstorms. Custom locations are handled by local ambiences that override the global weather system using an RTPC attached to volume.
Animals are integrated as ambiences as well, reacting to parameters such as time, wind and rain intensity.
Colin concludes the ambience portion by demonstrating how it has been implemented in code. He describes this part as “handcrafted” as to provide as much control as possible for the sound designers. He concludes this section of the presentation by explaining how ambient sounds were triggered from geometric volumes set by the team to create ambient zones that follow the listener inside, but that will stay clamped to the zone boundaries when the player exits the area.