Let's Build the RPG! - 18 - River Sound Audio Along a Spline - Unreal Engine 5 Blueprint Tutorial

In this episode, we set up dynamic spatialized flowing water sound over the course of a river. We start with how to set up a simple collision volume based on the general size and shape of a river. Then we cover how to change the position of the sound along the river spline relative to the player. To conclude we go over optimizations to the sound, including how to alter the pitch and volume based on how close or far away the player is to the mouth of the river. The goal is to make the sound of the river match both the velocity of the water and also the size (width) of the river.

Link to spreadsheet of all sounds used in this episode (and everything else used in this series, up to episode 18):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...


00:00 Intro
00:13 Today's Goals and Key Concepts
01:43 Preparation steps for this episode
03:38 Converting our river spline actor into a blueprint
04:33 Initial prep steps for Blueprint
06:23 Setting up Collision volume for river to trigger the sound upon overlap
19:07 Collision Overlap Event Setup
20:21 Adjusting location of the sound on the river relative to player location
22:50 Improving performance by disabling event tick behavior when ending overlap
24:34 Adjusting the volume and pitch of the river upstream vs. downstream
30:24 A challenge issued to you to improve the sound dynamics even further
31:45 Collapsing build to functions
32:37 Conclusion



New episode released every Saturday morning!



My favorite sources for free sound content:

https://www.zapsplat.com/
Zapsplat has higher quality sounds in general than freesound.org

https://freesound.org/
Freesound.org has a TON of free sounds, though most of them are lower quality. I typically use freesound.org if I'm looking for a more obscure sound



Direct References

Blueprint Spline components:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-...

Sound Cue Editor:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-...

Sound Attenuation:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-...

Sound Spatialization:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-...



Additional references

Audio in Unreal Engine 5:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-...