Adding Sounds in UE4-the basics

Sol Cutrera
code3100
Published in
3 min readMar 30, 2017

As part of the VR group our job is to create an experience in another reality this includes visuals, light, geometry, interaction and SOUND. Although we may not notice little things like the wind rustling through leaves, the creaking of a door opening and the click of a button, the lack of these sounds can be drastically noticed when inside a VR experience. They add to the immersion of the experience and help weave a spell over the user in creating presence.

I had not realised how much value sounds add to the experience until I started looking at tutorials and adding sounds to my own scenes. As a complete beginner to audio here are summaries of tutorials watched and quick reference guide for when trying to recreate the process.

Adding ambient sound

Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial — Ambient Audio (Basic!)

Drag sound from side menu onto scene

Details>Attenuation> Tick Override Attenuation

Drop down menu

Change Falloff Distance (larger outer sphere were the sound starts to fade in)

Change Radius (where the sound it in full volume)

Note: Sound is spatial when waking through with headphones the sound automatically is

Problem: when testing with sounds that already have two channels they don’t not play properly

Importing Sound into engine

Import make sure it’s a .wav file format

Wav- black box with wave form

If double click can edit setting like TRY NOT TO EDIT THIS

sound wave>loop

Volume

Pitch if you down longer length and up shorter length

Creating Cues

Right click> Create Cue

Cue instance of the wav all copies of the wav so change all without changing the raw sound so a sound can be used for different purpose, eg, water running, higher pitch sounds like sizzling oil

Adding multiple wavs into a cue

UE4 Basic Audio CUE Tutorial

In blueprint of cue-Select sounds

RC in blueprint> add> random multiple (or what you want)

CONNECT sounds to output. can modify by adding Loop, Delay, Mixer, etc

Recording and cleaning up sounds

How to: Remove background noise & Clean up your Audio (FREE AND EASY)

Recorded various flashlight clicks using Audacity

Then cleaned up background noise by selecting few seconds of recording that didn’t have clicks>effects>noise reduction>Get Noise Profile

Then Ctrl+A (to select whole clip)> effects>Noise Reduction> adjust settings>preview> before clicking ok make sure Noise is set to Remove not Isolate

To export specific parts in clip

Select desired part> file>export selected audio (make sure it is in .WAV so it can be imported into ue4)

Flashlight

Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial — First Person Flashlight

Created a flashlight following this tutorial and added sound of click through skills learnt in previous links. I recorded the sound of me clicking a torch on and off through audacity on my laptop. then edited and separated each click. Added to unreal and edited the blueprints so that when the flashlight is turned on (using the F key) the sound cue of the flashlight click would play. In the Cue is a random node that has 10 different recorded clicks so that the clicks heard when turning the torch on/off are the same but slight variations, to create a more realistic feel.

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