Tomorrow I’ll be starting the audio for my first VR game contract!! This is going to be Soooooo cool. I have no frickin clue how this system even works, but after some lengthy conversations with companies audio techs, I was assured that if I have a properly functioning PT HD rig, a board with a lot of channels, a surround sound monitoring system, and a couple microphones with at least two usable preamps, that they’ll guide me through the rest. The gaming system apparently does not need to mount or sync to my computer rig (thank God) and there’s also no coding involved on my end so I should be in pretty good shape. I probably shouldn’t say too much more about this, but the gaming company has released some cool stuff and seems to be active in the immersive/augmented/VR game space! Fun stuff…it takes a lot to make me nervous, but I really don’t want to screw this up! They’re gonna start by meeting here for a little while then VO cast is going to start rolling through later in the evening. Wow. Craziness!! Been wanting to pick up a serious project like this for over a year…finally getting a shot!
I’ve spent the last few hours cleaning the studio, checking the signals to the preamps, making sure my TB mic was good, testing drivers, got my music stands set up, updating plugins, re-building the Aviom (monitoring) routes in PT, and confirming the rental mics they requested will be available. Even changed lightbulbs and stocked up the refrigerator lol. Hmmm…pretty much done.
I’m interested to know how game audio works like this. I would assume in a VR environment, all the mixing, fx and stuff are all done in the game’s engine and not on a console. Are you doing music or sound design stuff?
ugh. Killing time waiting for the guy I’m renting those mics from to show up lol. Um…I doubt I’ll be doing this part, but the stuff goes through middleware…so part of the console is managing faders and channel strips and busses in the DAW. Then the middleware does links audio regions in your DAW to the game engine audio hierarchy. Once its in the hierarchy you can also control it with the console as well.
So you can modify sounds in your DAW and preview them in the game engine all at the same time. The board can’t control anything outside of the realm of audio…so it can’t help you with colliders or event triggers obviously, but it does give you some organization. And the visual feedback from the metering on the mixer I think will be helpful.
Ok…I gotta call this guy. I need those mics!!!
Ps…it’ll be a while before I’m the one managing that kind of production work though.
Well. Looks like they started with narration, and they really wanted to get acquainted the mic options first. Spent a good time on that, and discussing the process of the project. There were some really hilarious, ‘duh’ or ‘you gotta be kidding me’ moments in here I’ll be able to write about a little down the road lol. For reasons I probably shouldn’t go into, we almost didn’t get anything recorded today (and the session nearly got cancelled altogether), but we did end up doing our mic shootout at least.
AKG C414, Telefunken C-20, and 2 Blue Bottles in the pictures.
We spent some time taking some detailed notes and getting samples of the different mics with different lines. And this way when the rest of the VO cast comes through, the dialogue directors will know what they have to work with.
We started out watching video mixes from previous projects and fight scenes from the movie Pacific Rim so everyone could get used to hearing things in the room they’ll be spending a good amount of time in, spent another hour or so shooting lines and then called it a night
I would have moved the guitar gear into the garage and out of the way but I have a session guitar player coming in tomorrow morning.
Break a proverbial leg!
