Wwise Integration with Unity

March 10, 2019

Using Wwise with Unity

Game Audio

Youtube - Wwise and Unity: Getting Started with Unity & Wwise, Part 1
Youtube - Wwise and Unity: Ambient Sound Sources, Part 2

By: WestSideElectronicMusic

Wwise is a powerful audio editing tool specifically molded towards producing game audio. It also has strong integration with the Unity game engine that makes working between the two much smoother.

These tutorials help show the basic integration steps to make sure the two softwares can communicate with each other, and then starts to get into the basics of using WWise to produce interesting audio for your games. Between the two of them, we covered adding in a simple footstep sound effect and a torch sound effect.

The footstep audio was done to show the minimum required to add audio into Unity through Wwise. It was mostly important to note the need for creating audio effects in Soundbank objects in Wwise, then generating the objects to import into the Wwise editor in Unity. These objects then need to be placed in the Unity scene to actually be accessible as audio clips. The footstep effect will also be built upon in later tutorials to add some randomization as well as modifying the audio for stepping on different terrains.

The torch example got into some stronger features of WWise, focusing on 3D spatial audio and randomization. The fire sound effect for the torches could be made 3D, which allows it to have various audio effects depending on the distance/orientation of the object relative the player hearing it. We created a simple volume depreciation over distance with a distance cap, as well as adding a low pass filter to mimic the real world effect where lower frequencies are heard further away from an object than higher frequencies.

The torch example also got into the basics of creating randomization of sound effects. In Wwise, we created a Random Container object, which can hold several audio effects to randomly select from/play as well as modify randomly to give a play effect varied sound outputs. We duplicated our fire sound effect 3 more times in this container (4 in total), and just moved the starting/ending looping times of play in the different audio files to make them feel a bit different. We then also added a pitch randomized variation to one of these sound effects to give even more varied feels (I believe you can also have this on the Random Container itself to apply to all the objects, that might be what the tutorial wanted to do and just misclicked).

When you create these Random Containers, you just make sure to generate the Random Container object and use that as your audio clip. In Unity, you would reference the Container as your sound object and it contains all the information to produce random varied effects based on what you created in WWise.

Overall Wwise seems like a very powerful tool for creating audio effects for your games, especially in the Unity game engine as it has decent integration capabilities.