The Link :

Breath System in Wwise & UE5 (Part 2)

This article is an update from the previous one. We will see how I optimized voices by using a switch container instead of a blend container. If you didn’t read it i suggest you to do so as I will go straight to the point of how I did and won’t talk again about the system in itself.

To read the first article : The Link : Breath System In Wwise & Ue5 (Part 1) 

In the last article I was talking about the fact that I used blend containers instead of switch containers to make transitions between the different breaths available. My thought was to allow a smoother transition between them by fading from one to the other thanks to the blend track. However I later found a way to smooth the transition between two elements contained inside of a switch container.

As I was previously forced to use a switch container at the top level container inside of the breath system hierarchy (because I couldn’t make the blend work properly in the game for this container, I still don’t know why) I dig a bit more into the switch container and I found some options that I never took attention of before.

  • You can choose to apply a fade-in and fade-out time between containers inside of a switch container. This allows to smooth the transition for a certain amount of time between them instead of having a simple transition from one to another.
  • This is nice because the problem of a blend container is that it is in general reading every container contained inside of it to be able to blend between each of them when necessary, in some cases this is what we need but this coast a number of voices that won’t be usable for something else, even if we don’t hear those voices ingame.

We now have « the best of both world » : Smoother transitions between breath states and we also save some voices for other sounds to be played. I believe optimization is important, it takes more and more importance as the scale of the game you are working on is growing. To think about this everytime you are doing something helps to keep everything sorted inside of your project and will save you time in the future.

See you soon for another article !