Screen capture of unity with 3d scenes depicting rocks surrounding a pond with a giant cube with butterfly

Week 2: Pillars of sound

Having fun with free assets

Screen capture of Unity depicting a 3d scene with vegetation

Toying around with random free low poly assets I downloaded from the asset store

I played with some free assets in the Unity store. One downside with using assets from the store is having different art styles, so I sticked with low poly assets where I could achieve a consistent style while using several different assets.

At first, I wanted to make a gardenlike landscape. However, the free plant assets that I could find from the store wasn't pleasing enough. On the other hand, I could find plenty of rock assets. After exploring the assets I decided to make a scene that is rocky.

Terrain

Overlaying 2 terrains with different materials

In the asset store I discovered a water material and some terrain prefabs. I could make a pond by overlaying a flat terrain with water material on top of a concave terrain with ground-ish material.

Sound `"`pillars"

Screen capture of Unity depicting a 3d scene with 3 rock pillars surrounding a pond

Three "pillars" of sound

I bumped into an asset that was made for caves. The rock pillars looked interesting, so I decided to put them inside my scene. I didn't think about the sound yet but decided to play primary sounds when the player approaches the pillars.

Sound "rocks"

Screen capture of Unity depicting a 3d scene with various rocks surrounding a pond

Various rocks surrounding the pond

After I added the pillars it was time to add rocks of different sizes. I planned to play secondary sound effects when the player approaches the sounds.

Butterfly and cube

Screen capture of Unity depicting a 3d scene with a floating white cube and a flying butterfly

Butterfly and the AudioTrigger prefab

I had no particular reason behind adding this - the asset just looked so great, adding a dreamlike feeling. I put the cube while playing around the AudioTrigger cube prefab in Gabe's assignment asset file. I liked how the cube looked out of the blue between all the similar looking objects.

Composing the sound

A sample of the soundscape

Since I had 3 pillars and 7 rocks in total, it meant that I could use 3 main sounds and 7 sound effects. Having this in mind I made a short set of audio clips with 10 tracks overlaid in Ableton Live. While editing the track, I used field recording sources from the NYC subway, Central Park, and the Hongjechon Waterfall in Seoul(one that I recorded from before I came to Brooklyn).

screen capture of sound editing in ableton live

LOADS of delay and echo

I distorted the sounds with a lot of delay and echo to make a dreamy, consistent soundscape. I am personally satisfied with saxophone sounds - I recorded the samples from a random person playing the saxophone under a bridge in Central Park. It became a completely different sound after the editing.

Issues

Sound playing on awake even after unchecking unity's option

Sound playing on awake even after unchecking the option

I had a 'ghost sound' issue - even after unchecking the Play on Awake option, some sounds kept playing every time I hit 'play'. This happened even after I tried deleting the sound objects from the scene. I found a link of someone having a similar issue with me, but failed to solve the problem.

Unity console giving an error even after assigning the audio source

Console gives an error even after assigning the audio source

Also, another issue was that even after assigning the audio source & the audio trigger script, the console kept saying "You have not assigned an audio source in the inspector". I am working on these issues right now.

Unity giving error messages in console

After several attempts, I failed to build the project because of multiple errors. One issue that I suspect is I have touched something wrong while playing around with the free prefab assets in the first place. I had issues with the unity standard assets, and though I tried reimporting all of my assets, the build fails - before I was at least able to play the game, but after reimporting the scene was totally broken. Maybe I will try to fix this issue another day.