Foreword

At the point of final stages after core development, it is important for sound designers to process final mixing. It is a core time to re-manage the SFX clips, remove redundant structures and polish the effects on each bus.

However, even though Wwise published the Mastering Suite to simplify the whole work pipeline, it is still kind of inconvenient to set up an Eq or a Reverb plugin in Master-Mixer Hierarchy in Wwise. The audio designers are more familiar with the mixing pipeline in DAW, which has the well-known visualization plugins we use every daily work.

So in this article, I would like to talk about a way to transform the final mixing pipeline from Wwise to DAW.

Direction 1：Wwise internal record

In authoring audio preferences panel, we can send each top level bus to audio device and hardware device. So there is a direction which is sending each bus in Wwise to different audio device and record them seperatly.

I tried but there is a misunderstanding: when wwise connect platform remotely (Game Engine), there is no signal go through Wwise! Actually, we will record nothing this way!

So the question turns to: how to internally record the sound in unity with separate tack?

It's a hard problem to deal with because there is no console mix panel in Unity project settings. So we can't achieve a feature like internal recording in Unity.

Maybe a plugin can do this... And we tried another direction.

Direction 2：Wwise Recorder

There is an effect plugin named Recorder, which allows us record Wav or Wem files. But the file will be overwritten every time audio begins on one of the child objects or buses. It means we can only get a sound effect recorded after the whole gameplay.

https://www.audiokinetic.com/zh/library/edge/?source=Help&id=wwise_recorder_plug_in_effect

The question turns to: how to avoid record effect plugin overwritting?

Finally, we find a solution: use silence loops to let the buses always be playing. If there is no stop, there is no overwrite.

Step1: set silence loop to each bus you need to record

*Do not forget to set the volume to the top. The reason is in my Wwise project, the volume of a bus can be set under -96db by volume RTPC controller. And if the sound volume is under -96db, the Wwise will regard the bus as stopped and the record effect plugin will stop and overwrite later.

Step2: post every silence loop in the first event triggered

Step3: set the Recorder in each bus you want to record

*The game output path is where you want to save the wav file.

Step4: play the game in engine and have fun :)

The silence loops will be triggered after the event posted and every bus will be playing. The wav file will be saved after you end the game.

Step5: import all the wav files to your DAW, mixing!

step6: copy all the plugin values in the Wwise plugins

Summary

There are still many points that need to be modified:

1. Recorder plugin sometimes doesn't start.

2. Maybe a  batch configuration tool can help designers to copy the plugin value more quickly and accurately.

3. Modifying the Recorder plugin can make the pipeline easier to use.

4. ...