Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Adding an engine sound to an animation.

First we need an engine sound to work from. I found www.freesound.org. This site gives me a huge data base of sounds. I simply registered; so I could download, found the sounds I wanted and downloaded it. This is what I found:


This sound is perfect for me because it's a good steady sound. The volume doesn't get quieter or louder, the pitch stays the same, no background interference, however it is only like this for a short period of time so now I just need to cut that out and loop it, for this I will use a free sound editing program called Audacity.

There are several ways I can add sound to this rendered animation, I can either add it after, so render the animation go into a video program and add the sound and to adjust the sound in the video program. This way I can get fade in and fade out effects as the plane fly's by. Or I can add the sound in the 3Ds max program and the sound will get rendered with it. I prefer this second way, it gives me more control over the time line and to get it to meat the animation as close as possible.

Every things ready I need to import the sound. Firstly I need to add a 'Helper' called sound. This is so I can Anchor a sound to it.

Place on the scene at coordinates Z-0, X-0, Y-0. Then to add the sound to it. Open up 'Track view-Curve editor'.

Make sure you have the Sound helped selected. Double click the word 'Sound' in the sub tree menu. and I need to add the sound I need to use.

I now have a work sound in my scene, so if I were to render this animation I will have the sound added with it.



However I have a problem my camera zooms in onto the plane and the zooms out, so I need to volume to increase and then decrease; fade in, fade out.

In the sub tree menu I need to click the plus sign and some options sound come out; Waveform and Volume. It's the volume I need to edit.

The green dotted line you can see is the max volume of the sound. Underneath is a time line. This time line is exact same time line as the one in the scene, so I can match them up.

So I need to add a curve. I can do this by using the 'Draw Curves' tool. I need to add points where the volume reaches the lowest and highest points.

My curve is now in place and I now have fade in and fade out effects.

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