Synaesthesia Honours Project: FPP Multi-surface Footsteps in UE4 + FMOD
- Miroslaw Sienkiewicz
- Nov 5, 2018
- 2 min read
Footsteps for First Person Player on different surfaces.
This is a result of combination of multiple tutorials with my own approach.
First of all, after building basic template in Unity I moved back to UE4 but with FMOD as middleware. Surprise, surprise… it works without issues. Also, today I recorded some sounds for my other project and I thought that maybe I’ll try samples of Hard Wood Surface in my Honours Project.
After making basic template:
I maked footsteps event in FMOD:
And then I followed this tutorial to create basic foosteps system in UE4:
https://youtu.be/QVMfvLbLty4 and it was fine but two problems I had:
First one was that I wanted to have multiple surfaces. So, I checked other tutorials and forums and I found solution in a forum topic about exact same video. Someone did extension to the video here:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/vr-ar-development/1392864-footsteps/page2 - basic trick with LineTraceByChannel that is used for Third Person Player’s footsteps.
It works but there was still a second problem: footsteps are triggered when played jumps.
My solution came with another tutorial: https://youtu.be/nzvvz0VBLZA
But instead of following this one I just looked at different approach which is usually if not always used for Third Person Player (I did it in my other project). This approach is to use animation sequence and add custom events on animation timeline. This ‘animEvent’ used in animation blueprint trigger another custom event in first person character blueprint called ‘footstep’
And as the result, I came from this (which is the basic footsteps system):
To this:
Much simpler and neat solution for multi-surface footsteps that are not triggered when player is in the air.
I learn today that footsteps should stay as 2D sounds. I tried them as 3D sound and I could hear unnatural phasing and spatial position changes while walking and rotating player pawn.
I tried one sound to check attenuation settings for sounds that will play one sound per room so they can’t be heard in other rooms