Just returned from another very exciting Blizzcon show in Anaheim.
Plenty of Buzz surrounding both the new WOW expansion "Mists of Pandera", Starcraft 'Heart of the Swarm' and for the game I'm currently wrapping up 'Diablo 3'!!!! I was fortunate enough to take part in our Blizzard Sound Panel 'Sounds of Sanctuary: Diablo 3' that we did at this years Blizzcon show. We covered a lot of ground like sound design, implementation, voice casting, music composition and most of all working together as a cohesive team to deliver an awesome product. I feel very fortunate to have taken part and hope that everyone enjoys our efforts when Diablo 3 is released next year.
Here I am (on the left) with the Lead Sound Designer for Diablo 3, Joseph Lawrence (right). The topic I covered during our talk was on the sound design for all of the creatures in Diablo 3. Many different techniques are utilized for creature sound design and there are several plug ins, software apps, and hardware units that definitely help in the process. But one of the things that I believe is crucial for the success and believability of a monster is finding a good anchor sound. This anchor sound could be a voice actor, an animal, or any combination of the two. Once you have this established, and it works in game, then you can pull out all of your processing bag of tricks to embellish it. This technique definitely worked for me on Diablo 3!!
Here I am two years ago at the GDC conference in San Francisco giving a lecture entitled "Sound Design for Next Gen. Games"
Topics included SFX Recording, Foley, Creative Sampling Techniques, Extreme Pitch Shifting, Frequency & Amplitude Modulation, Futzing, IR Manipulation, Granular Synthesis, and Spectral Modification with KYMA.
This a a screen grab of one of the KYMA patches that I made for some dialog processing for a main character in God of War III. As you can see it looks very similar to the layout of the Unreal Sound Cue editor. However, as you can see in KYMA the signal flow or execution order runs from left to right where as in Unreal Sound Cue it runs from right to left. Both tools use an algorithmic or module based sound processing process.
Here is a screen grab of a 5.1 ambience that I made in the SCEA sound tool, SCREAM.
Top left is all of the sounds and their representative scripts that I have made to form the 5.1 ambience.
Lower left is a list of all of the actual sound files that I have loaded into memory for this 5.1 ambience.
Right side is the actual sound 'script' that was made for the Frogs layer (sound) that is one SFX layer in this ambience.
SCREAM reminds me of Digidesign Samplecell with BASIC logic scripting with a little MIDI controller data (0-127) thrown in.
The entire sound is a Jungle/Swamp ambience that plays a 4 channel bed of insects along with various scripted layers that randomly play in the 5.1 surround field.
After hearing everyone and their grandmother talk about the UnReal Game Engine I decided to pick up a copy and dive in.
This is a screenshot of the second level that I have built so far and I really find it interesting and fun to work with.
Unreal Editor 3 reminds of making my own dungeons on sheets of graph paper back in my Dungeons & Dragons days, maybe that's why it's so second nature to me????
Here are some Greek temples that I made in Maya to practice my skills with.
While Maya is not an audio tool, some video games are built around Maya created levels and being able to navigate through them is a skill that I know will come in handy one day.
BIO: Michael Edward Johnson
Bio:
After hearing what my brother later described as a 'synthesizer' the wheels were set in motion for a never-ending adventure to push the sonic envelope. After seeing a demonstration on a prototype Emulator II at Cabrillo college in Santa Cruz, I found my true calling. Sampling and computer editing of audio was the way of the future and I wanted to be a part of it! Over time the Emulator turned into Emulators, PPG WaveTerms, and even a Series II Fairlight. Now I knew what I wanted to do, but how do you go about making a living at it?? Not too much work in Central California for audio editing! So, I loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly........
