The Last of Us – Sound Design Redo

A little exercice as I was a fan of the franchise, I redid all the sound design and only the voices were provided by Naughty Dog.


Watchdogs 2 DLC

– Watchdogs 2 DLC Mandate:

On this video you have an extract of the 1st of the mission I managed Soundwise for the No Compromise DLC of Watchdogs 2. It was one of these great times where you ship a full game and the team have the possibilities to take more time to have fun on DLC parts. That was also the case for us on the audio team, we had a great time working with Ubisoft Paris for this expansion.

I handled the in-game sounds of this mission  : occlusions, explosions, foley, scripted moments, cutscene integration and the music integration (composed by Hudson Mohawke) until the end of that mission.  And if you have the courage to play the whole DLC the cherry on the cake would be an impressive firework show to close the expansion, enjoy!


Watchdogs 2 

Watchdogs 2 Mandate

On this video you see an extract of the final mission of the game Watchdogs 2 that I managed soundwise under the Audio direction of Olivier Girard at Ubisoft.

I handled the in-game sounds of this mission  : occlusions, explosions, foley, scripted moments, cutscene integration and the music integration (composed by Hudson Mohawke) until the ending credits of the game. This mission is quite important as you have the chance to become 3 importants characters of the game (Sitara, Wrench and Marcus), I only show the Wrench part in this extract but if you want to see the full walkthrough till the end, it’s available here : Watchdogs 2 End Walkthrough (*spoiler)


Rainbow 6 Siege Foley

Rainbow 6 Foley Mandate :

Here is an video extract of a project from Ubisoft called ‘Rainbow 6 Siege’. I worked on it for a year and I was responsible for the whole Foley of the game. First, I want to give you a few stats regarding the assets of the Foley sounds in the game which is about 8k wav files combining : 3 types of gear, 23 surfaces, 2 types of shoes and 1 barefoot, 5 foley categories of weapons for mechanical sounds (regroup more than 40 model of guns) and 1 shield, 9 debris navigation layers and additional assets for the rappel mechanic.

Unfortunately due to an NDA with my current company I cannot provide Wwise audio engine captures so I will try to explain briefly my work on rainbow 6 Siege. To make things easier to understand, I am going to divide things by sound categories used on the navigation system.

The base Navigation System is divided into 3 different body archetypes and uses weapon customizations that will impact how the characters sound when they move.

  • Armor Types :

In the game we have 3 types of armor depending on the operators (=characters) : Light, Medium and Heavy.

These armors are switches inside Wwise that will trigger the correct clothing/gear sounds depending on the armor. This armor is set via our game editor and it’s a standard database table that’s calling back our switches. 

We also have an additional gear type called ‘tool belt’ that will play exclusively when doing rappel (set via an RTPC) and Hazmat suits for special missions. 

The challenge I found the most difficult was to hear the difference between Light and Medium armor so that the player have a feel of the weight, you can hear the final result in my video example.

  • Weapons Layers :

Depending what gun the character will use, we choose to add extra layers of weapons on top of the armor, in Wwise so we regrouped the weapons into categories such as : Handgun, LMG, MG, Shotgun and SMG.

Same principle as the gear a sounds : a switch tagged on the weapons is triggering the sound additive layers when moving. This layer will play mechanical sounds when moving depending on which gun the player has in its hands.

  • Shoe types :

We have 2 types of shoes : sneakers for Ai enemies and Boots for Playable Characters, the boots have an EQ that we modify depending on the type of armor (using an RTPC) so that we can put more weight when the character has a medium or heavy armor. We also have a barefoot type that was used exclusively for the hostage that you need to rescue.

  • Surfaces and Debris :

This game contained a lot of different surfaces as every map was located in a different country (snow, country with grass and dirt, muddy training camps, etc) so it was a lot of teamwork to make this functional in game. We need every mesh to be correctly assigned by the level designers to detect and play the right surfaces and sounds. It was a classic implementation using switches for surfaces although we added extra layers for debris on the ground (glass, branches, mixed debris) that was detected via ray casting around the player and playing the appropriate debris sounds.

  • Integration :

All of these sounds were contained in one play event per movement e.g ‘play_nav_walk’ and it was triggering footstep, gear and the additive layers at the same time so that we didn’t loose time creating too many sounds events for each part of the body. The drawback of this type integration is the cost of the amount of voices being played at the same time so we had to limit the polyphony of the foley and play the ones that were the most important e.g. in the closest range of the player.

We had a basic animation tool to integrate the sound events on the NPCs in our game editor and I also pushed to develop a tracking tool with the help of our friendly coders to notify the sound team if any changes (timing and keyframes) were made to the animations.

To concludemanaging the Foley pipeline was a great challenge on this production and I am glad we managed to raise the ‘foley’ quality of the rainbow games, in addition to the propagation system of this game, sound was taken seriously on the production side and the players seem to enjoy it.

If you have questions and would like to have more info on the subject, just drop me a line.


Dialogue Production Demo

Regarding the projects in this video, here is the detail of my work :

Assassin Creed III and Black Flag : I managed the recordings (in motion capture stage and worldwide studio recordings) and the integration of the VOs for the whole scripted part of the game (including cinematics). Integration was done via wwise and the proprietary Engine : Anvil.

Child of Light : I managed the VO implementation and post-production but also worked on the sound design fro creatures, magic and ambiences. Integration was done via wwise and the proprietary engine : UbiArt Framework (Rayman’s video game engine).


The Secret World (Funcom) Sound Demo :

The Secret World (Funcom) – MMOrpg : Monsters, Magic and Ambience Sound Design integrated using Fmod as an API of the proprietary engine Dreamworld Control Center.