I’m new to sound design and FMOD Studio. I was wondering if anyone could provide me some tips for designing car engine. I’ve checked the ‘car engine’ example in FMOD studio and it is almost what I need. Car engine in FMOD studio example behaves like automatic engine. Is there any way to simulate changing gear?(upshift/downshift). Or is it something that have to be controlled by 2 parameters ‘rpm’ and ‘load’ in game? e.g. limiting rpm to some level and when triggered upshift decreasing ‘rpm’ slightly by rapidly rapidly and then limiting rpm at higher level? How ‘load’ should be controlled?
I going to simulate race cars so I noticed that in real life those cars emit some sound from exhaust when changing gear and load is big - how can this be simulated? Another issue is that when rpm stay exactly at the same level the sound sounds a little bit artificial - is there any way to randomize it a little bit?
Is there any more advanced car engine project for reference somewhere?
I would think that the shifting would have to be simulated at the programmer level. That is to say, when the player shifts, the code will bring the RPM parameter of your engine event back down to zero. You could also have another event for the one-shot sound of gears clunking.
Load is something that’s typically tied to the game’s physics. This allows the engine to sound different when it’s “struggling” more rather than spinning easily. With load, you can fade the sound to a more grunty sound.
As for the variation, try adding a touch of slow moving flanger and/or distortion (varied with modulation). That way you get some variation without changing the fundamental pitch. Something else that will help a lot with realism is to have multiple source recordings at various RPMs. Having a single loop played at various pitch will sound too electronic and fake.
As RichardPGoulet says, the actual behaviour of your engine will have to be controlled by your game’s code. Studio allows you to set up sounds so that they’re triggered by the behaviour of certain parameters, and those parameters can have whatever names, ranges, numbers and content make the most sense for your game, but the values of those parameters will have to be set and updated by your game via our programmer’s API.
If you want to install engine sound in the cars of your game and make it feel like real than you will have to study about actual engine. Many car companies install special engine-sound for some special purpose. Car manufacturers like BMW, Audi and many others employ a special team of sound engineers and after their deep research any sound is installed on particular car engine. Thus all you need to do is study about different car engines, their specifications, sound etc. You can also visit any car engine dealers or manufacturers, so as to fetch their knowledge about engine.