Mixing

The first week was Thanksgiving, which I took off to spend time with my family. The second week I started mixing (5 hr).

1 ) Routing Audio

For our project, we’re using Unity’s built-in mixer instead of other middleware like Wwise or FMOD. This was my first time using it, so it was a bit of a learning curve. I first set up a hierarchy of mixer objects, and then routed the audio player objects to those mixers. The organization I came up with is as follows:

“NewAudioMixer” acts as the final layer before the audio listener (which sends audio to the speakers). Inside NewAudioMixer exists the SFX mixer with all of its different sub-mixers in different categories.

I sorted the sounds by action instead of source because I thought it may be more useful to mix using the relative importance of each action versus the importance of the source. I.e. in a game in which there can exist a huge number of player troopers and enemy units, it becomes more crucial to emphasize the importance of certain actions (landing attacks) rather than others which are less important (footsteps).

Another weird thing you may notice is that there is a sub-mixer for the SFX but not for the Music or Ambience. That’s because the mixers actually hide all of their children when you are viewing the parent of that mixer, whereas you would see every single group and its children when viewing the mixer that those groups belong to. Since I don’t need any children for Music or Ambience, I just kept those as groups for simplicity’s sake.

2 ) Volume Balance

My mix plan was to outwards. In other words, I first would mix each child mixer of the SFX mixer, and then I would mix all of the children together, and then finally mix the SFX, Music, and Ambience together. At this point I’m almost done with volume balancing the SFX.

The tricky part was orchestrating a way to get the majority of the SFX to play together at once, and also making that easily repeatable or loop-able. What I did was set up a large-scale battle between a mixture of troops and ants. For now the battle is being held in the middle of nowhere, but when I move onto mixing in the building sounds, I will move the battle into the base.

The mix (and the game) will be done by the end of the week! I’m very excited, and will post a demo of some gameplay and the final mix.