Bill Mueller wrote on Sat, 18 December 2010 18:29 |
Banjamin,
Can you attach your objects to 3D graphic objects in a game engine?
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There are great audio game engines on the market (Wwise, Fmod, Rapture, and in-house middlewares developed by studios). Most of them are designed so that they won't eat up more than 1-5% of the processing time, because visuals stay the most important modality in games.
We wanted to address something else, so our mixing engine wasn't designed with the "game industry" in mind.
One of our goals was to be able to mix different panning techniques into one single mix (eg stereo+transaural+ambisonics+surround amplitude panning+...), along with serious acoustics modeling. The dreaded object approach was almost inevitable...
So we didn't want to write another game audio engine, and it's definitely not what AudioStage is about.
Anyway, if you are in some sound design work for 3D animation movies, AudioStage can import 3D trajectories from Maya or 3DS max and use them while building up your project, instead of making endless adjustments to panning automation.
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(Sorry Keith, in game design I don't have another term because even though we are viewing on a flat screen, we do build our worlds in in-game 3D space.)
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We could use the term "track". That's so more subjective I can barely size it up, being object-based myself now!
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I suggest the "object oriented audio programming" unless supported by "the object" (as in a video game or movie), in the listeners experience will detract from the final result by tricking the creator to accept something less than if he did not have the object oriented tool in the first place. This is the exact same thing as when you hear us old farts telling the young studs to not look at their Pro Tools monitor when mixing. Use your ears!
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Think again: what are you really doing when mixing some music-only content, without any image support? Aren't you constructing a (warped, subjective... whatever) scene or soundscape?
And what kind of tools are you using for that? your ears of course, but also electrical levels and components, gold capsules, wires, sliders or rotating buttons... I don't think audio gear is more "subjective" than a 3D scene you probably already have in mind, consciously or not...
Regarding the use of 3D sound, just remember what Hugh Padgham did on Sting's Soul Cages back in 1991, using QSound to widen the stereo image on some (err) tracks. I'm not a fan of the music, but it resulted in a crisp, open, stereo mix, because there was more space to put a lot of details between the speakers. That 60