Honours Project Development: metal Surface Footsteps

For metal surface I did recordings of 4 types of shoes: smart shoes, safety shoes and two sneakers: Puma and Adidas. For every type I recorded for different settings: walk and run with close and far (half the distance between head and foot) microphone.

Surface that I used for this recording was a heater on wall in my house. Everything was recorded with gunshot microphone and edited in Cubase. Together I collected 228 audio assets. I tried all the footsteps in FMOD and UE4 and I decided to use ‘smart shoes walk close mic’ as these have the closest timbre to wood surface footsteps. Selected assets were edited in Cubase to match them to wood surface footsteps which I found as sounding very convincing.

I matched EQ curve of both surface types. High frequency exciter was also added as send effect as metal surface assets were still missing these frequencies and EQ couldn’t give convincing effects when hi-freqs were boosted. Finally, my favourite compression plugin was added ‘MJUC’ which adds tiny bit of character by itself and compressor settings pushed sound forward which makes footsteps sound as they’re coming from bigger distance (approximately equivalent to distance from ear to foot).

Finally, all assets were exported and replaced all previous assets used for metal surface footsteps. Random pitch was adjusted to give more natural effect as with previous settings it sounded unrealistic.