Forza 3, making cars sound awesome article, good read!

[Mr Whippy]

http://jalopnik.com/5478591/inside-forza-motorsport-part-ii-making-the-cars-sound-awesome

I want to go buy some more mic's and sound recording gear

Got some at work I can borrow, but I think I might want more hehe!


My main thoughts were, how they mix it into the final sample sets, how they mix it in real-time (ie, in-game), and how they compensate for the roller noise. Clearly they get mic's really near to the stuff generating the noise so as to avoid lots of the roller noise too, but then you have other issues. Ie, my car sounds twice as rorty and rumbly and crackly on the over-run if you put a mic about half a foot from the exhaust tip, vs stood back about 2m from the car... hmmmm...


I was thinking a proper hub dyno might be quieter. There is one near me, about £100 for a morning iirc, was tempted to go fully sample my Z4 inside and out, so my Racer version sounds extra nice

Dave

 

[KS95]

I don't understand how they can make samples from acceleration sounds. Do you not need to record per samples at the same RPM? I've seen people make sound mods for TDU from YT videos of acceleration..

 

[Mr Whippy]

I guess if they travel through the rpm relatively slowly, say a 40 second ramp from idle to max rpm, over a 5000rpm range say, then you get 8s per 1000rpm, or 4s (enough for a nice looping sample), every 500rpm.

Over 500rpm I guess the note of an engine won't change too heavily.

As long as the sample has no doppler effect (which it won't if it's stuck to the car), then I suppose you can correct for the pitch change, especially well if you know the rpm's...

On a good dyno you can limit the acceleration speed, so that you could say at 20s the engine is at 2000rpm, and at 30s it is at 3000rpm, and so you can very accurately correct for pitch change and make it sound like a constant rpm.

To do it from a YouTube video is probably hard, and lossy, with many of the detailed sounds being lost in compression and extrapolation etc.


Some good software, probably what Turn 10 use, is a good idea too. If they can do all the sounds with it, then it's probably pretty good.


Also, I'm not sure if Turn10 did it (didn't watch the videos on that link in great detail), but with a decent dyno, you can hold certain rpm's at any load you want too.
So I could get a mic on the airbox intake, one at the exhaust, and a stereo pair inside the car (on each side of a football at head height maybe ), and then have the car run at idle rpm max throttle for 5s, then at 2000rpm, then at 3000rpm, then at 4000rpm right through.

The difficulty is an off-throttle sound though. I have a feeling they might dyno at very small throttle openings to sustain any given rpm, then simply discard the airbox induction noise sample etc... and probably mix out more exhaust noise, leaving mainly engine mechanical noise...

Ideally you would want a dyno which could spin the engine for you haha.


If I do any of this I'll document it and of course post my results. I've wanted to do it for ages to see how good I can get things. I'd deffo use a nice hub dyno though, which alleviates all the tyre on roller noise. That said, the little hub dyno things might be noisy... not sure

Dave

 

[KS95]

Interesting.. you've got me thinking Whippy.. I'll have to play around with some sounds and look into that software sometime soon, cheers

 

[brother_david]

Just for the fun of it; the Gran turismo series has got some of the worst carsounds i've heard, problem is, and this was admitted, the sounds were recorded without any load to the engine, making it sound less 'grudgy'