Today as we continue work on LoL I'll be talking more about the Loladins and a bit about the Humans, as well as delving into the overarching design process behind units. I'll also be talking a bit about
sounds and how their role plays so much into this mod.
The Making of Loladins of Legend - Part 3
So, right now I'm asking myself a pretty important question at 7:44am. An ungodly early hour, but I can't sleep even with melatonin. It happens. I'll probably pass out in a few hours when my anti-psychotics exhaust me enough. Until then, I've got some time to think in peace.
Now that I have two sources of graphics - The MDX importer recently released and Requiem - I've gotta figure out where to focus my attention.
Between the Hammerdin and Battlemage, I've given the Loladins two critical mid-range units. As far as good-aligned races are concerned, they are really the only functional ones, followed by Humans who have two noteworthy mid-range units and that's it.
Loladin units are very strong but are more expensive than those of most races. Humans are kind of the Deep Hive of the good-aligned races; most of their units are very expendable and very cheap. Humans are often regarded as not very bright, easily moved and influenced, and for the most part ignorant to the greater workings of the world.
For the moment I've opted to get one of the easy monster-type units out of the way - one I'll be using for a Legendary Baelificus hero, the Avatar of Doom.
Doom is essentially the God of Evil. He was defeated in year 42 by Sir Lol in a cosmic game of Chess, which by the laws of the universe, reduced much of his armies into feces and trapped him in a block of ice on the Sun. Trapped on the freezing Sun, Doom must taste the blood of righteousness to be free. That is to say, every twisted or evil act committed by anyone strengthens Doom that much more.
In 2042, Doom is freed. At first he is able to create "impressions" or images of himself which take many forms and thus are represented across many different avatars. This is the Avatar of Destruction. I've reskinned him from green to red to fit the bill a little better.
[imgwh 500x500]
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/6336/animation81.gif[/imgwh]
Rendering the animation sets for this guy took about 10 minutes start to finish. They are now ready to go through the renaming script and get compiled, then processed in-game. I'll probably wait until the sounds are made before I do this. I also need a portrait. Portraits tend to be harder to find.
I made him a bit smaller since I made that gif.
Now, the big thing about this guy is that none of the sounds in my library will really fit him. There aren't many voice actors out there who can pull out a convincingly evil voice, much less with accompanying Attack/Gethit/Death sounds. It falls down to me to produce this myself.
Sound Design
The critical thing about LoL that no other age of wonders 2 mod has in quantities greater than meager amounts is custom sounds. Right now the mod has a 6.5gb archive of sounds both created by hand, remixed, and pulled out of other games or commercial cds. The amount of fully custom voice acting the mod will require will eventually exceed that of the vocal content used from other games simply because of the number of units that need voices.
In vanilla AoW2 there is only a few dozen sound effects used over and over again across the 15 races. Sounds are probably the most massive portion of this mod, even greater in significance than the huge graphics work. But unlike graphics, which come slowly and are difficult to create, sounds are my specialty and my playground.
I have a variety of actors at my disposal, both female and male, and an entire community I may call upon in the late future at the end of production. Though it may be difficult to convince someone to produce a voice for a mod that won't be made public, I always offer the mod to anyone who has participated in its production. However, the community in question is oriented more around fan subs for anime and such, and finding interest in games - even in Starcraft - is difficult. Back in AO's production I sought a female actor for the Fallen Hero, and had almost given up hope until finally one e-mailed me long after the thread had fallen into obscurity.
With as many roles as this mod will require I will be no doubt doing most of the acting myself.
At least for villains this is really, really easy.
I am not good at graphics. My strengths lay in writing, design, and sound. I have been doing voice acting since I was a wee child, fifteen years past in a 22 year life. When I entered digital production over a decade ago I immediately transitioned to digital voices and this grew with my modding, even moreso in most cases.
IskatuMesk - 2010 quarter 1 Voice Acting practice
Though most of my acting in the last few years has been focused on perfecting a handful of key voices, I will expand my vocabulary and diction for this project considerably.
I tend not to reveal my trade secrets for voice editing but today I shall provide you an exception.
But first, before we begin, I must explain how I voice act.
As I've said before, sound is extremely important. I can't just say, "Oh, I want to voice act the god of all things Evil."
No, I've got to not only set the mood but enter the mind of that character. For me, an individual so hateful and spiteful, becoming the bad guy is natural more than not. This is why I am really good at voices of villains and weak in the voices of the average joe. I can't make a convincing Paladin, but my demon's tongue has swooned many a critic.
I can also do really good comedic voices, but we'll talk about those when I get into the Confederates.
An increasingly severe challenge in my voice acting is the decay of my motor functions as a result of my mental disabilities. Typing and speaking have both suffered, speaking moreso. I easily stumble over words, forget what to say, or trail off. It is increasingly difficult to shape lengthy dialogue in consistency. At least for AoW2 I don't have to worry about lengthy dialogue, only very short lines for when a player (any player) clicks on the unit, + attack/gethit/death noises.
But even so I take so minor a task as seriously as hundreds of lines of dialogue. Because when a player finds this unit I want him to experience the energy behind it.
What sounds define the Baelificus, Legion of the Underworld, and the hordes of icky evilness that surrounds them?
Dungeon Keeper 2 Ingame Music
Final Fantasy XII Music - Esper Battle
Every Avatar of Doom reflects a portion of his power. Destruction is battlelust/warmongering/hatred, Deception is deceit, Greed is... Well, Greed, Lust is Lust, so on so forth. As a God, he isn't limited to any single form or personality. He represents everything the Goody faggots otherwise revere as not very goody and potentially dangerous.
If we wanted a theme
specifically for the Avatar of Destruction (and we will for the mod's soundtrack, each Legendary gets their own track), what would we go with?
Something boisterous, like...
Dante's Inferno Soundtrack (CD1) - Bleeding Charon (Track #6)
Or perhaps something more sinister and ambient, like...
God Of War III Soundtrack - Overture (Introduction) *NEW*
Well, keep in mind there are two factors to this. One is obviously the character itself, but one is also when the track gets played ingame - randomly, during overworld activity (not during combat). I've used God of War music for ambient music in the past with this mod, specifically the mid-range passive-aggressive pieces, using action pieces in actual combat music.
Bleeding Charon's energy would fit more with a combat track. The GoW3 track still has energy but can also pass off as semi-ambient.
Or we can use something totally different.
Darksiders Soundtrack - Darksiders Theme (Great Quality)
Considering we are talking about
the God of war/hatred/chaos, we'll need power in the theme regardless of its placement.
This theme in particular is one I will use to help determine the prose of his voice.
Meanwhile, I'm working on a graphic for the Humans.
[imgwh 270x270]
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/952/animation82q.gif[/imgwh]
With forces as dark and twisted and evil and grimy and terrifying as Doom at their heels, humans are very dependent on leadership and a startling new power rumored to be called "tactics" to overcome the hordes of demons, orcs, dragons and other distasteful things attempting to make off with the latest farmgirl. Humans are a particularly industrious lot, and enjoy the art of turtling. That is to say, they build gigantic castles and towers and slowly crawl their way across the battlefield towards their opponents. They make extensive use of siege weaponry, including cannons, to make up for their shortcomings of being at the bottom of the food chain. When all else fails, they have endless quantities of pilgrims with which to give dull broadswords and hurl in the general direction of whatever threatens Modern Earth.
[imgwh 640x329]
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/6990 ... throtk.jpg[/imgwh]
Built on the backbones of stout pilgrims, the average Human castle is the size of Minas Tirith or even larger. However, they rarely build their castles into mountains like that, for fear of underground gateways leading a horde of grubby demons or minotaurs into their backsides.
It isn't difficult to rile up pilgrims to join the army, in fact there is often far more bodies than there is equipment to arm them with. However, keeping a sense of cohesion about the army is a difficult one.
Our gentleman here would be a low-mid range Human unit. Most pilgrims are only very lightly armored in tattered clothing and wooden sticks before they can prove they are worth more attention. This fellow is donning full plate and even has a shield, so he's obviously of some value.
Another key characteristic of humans is that they are pansies. Even a full-grown man will have a hard time carting around full plate all day. That shit is heavy. So, most of their armored units are pretty slow. They are cheaper than those counterparts of other races, however, allowing you to make up for this weakness in numbers.
Most humans prefer using lighter armor, but someone's gotta play the living shield, might as well be this guy. He shall be our
Knight unit, tier 2. He has a mohawk for some reason; this is actually an NPC graphic and not a character like the Hammerdin was. Just makes him all the more manly I suppose. Being manly is very important when you rescue those farmgirls or, more likely, die horribly trying. At least those demons will think to themselves: "Oh man, that guy I just decapitated looked REALLY manly! I should stow away his head for a portrait on my wall."
For some reason I called his folder, containing all of his textures and bmps, HumanTemplar. As there is already a Templar unit (Loladin meat shield) I am sure I will end up confusing the living fuck out of myself later on in the future. Kind of like with ITAS, a Starcraft mod in which I named all of the various animation scripts with amusing names like "cocklot", "eeeee", "zeehaloot", ect. And when I returned to the mod around 5 years later I had no FUCKING IDEA what anything was. That was when I decided to not do that anymore. Unfortunately, all of my wc3 files are also named weird and hilarious names and are scattered across my 5.5tb of space. Since the shitty wc3 model viewer can't just be associated with mdx files and claims they are an unknown format I can't just search for *.mdx and open them that way. Put two and forty-two together and you get PAIN! That's what I have to endure to get my mdxs into max.
Blizzard's mapping communities and tool developers tend to be fail like that. Hopefully sc2 is a little different. Us modders pride ourselves in doing things the
right way. But mappers never get that. They'll settle for anything. Silly mappers.
Normally I don't change the lighting but I want him to be a bit brighter somehow. Hmm.
[imgwh 270x270]
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/952/animation82q.gif[/imgwh][imgwh 270x270]
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/4232/animation83.gif[/imgwh]
There we go, that looks a bit better.
Chances are that because some of the graphics get fairly dark I will need to do subtle light adjustments as I go along. However, I have to be very careful not to make them too great of an adjustment or the graphics won't look correct side-by-side with the normally lit ones.
At this moment I'm talking with a guy who's gonna make me a script to center all of my diablo 2 graphic exports. Long story short, their frames aren't centered with each other across all of their directions and this makes it a royal bitch to align them in AoW2 as you have to do it manually per direction per animation.
Additionally, because this is a fairly basic unit, we're rendering with a lower framecount (30frames for most anims) than we did with the Loladin units or the Avatar of Destruction. This means we can make him animate a little faster and thus his turns will run a lot faster. That's a good thing when there's a lot of him, and his individual actions aren't as complex or dramatic as those of the bigger units.
[imgwh 270x270]
http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/5733/animation84.gif[/imgwh]
His gethit animation has the Blizzard-esque laziness of the feet sliding along the ground, and it's REALLY noticeable. There's not much I can do about it. You see this all the time in wc3 and a fair amount in sc2 as well. But very rarely in WoW; WoW's animators are much more experienced than wc3's division, the same team working on sc2. I'd go as far to say that WoW's animators are amongst the best in the industry.
Uh oh, big problem.
[imgwh 270x270]
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/7065/animation85.gif[/imgwh]
His sword clips out of the frame in the death animation!
Normally I don't mind if there's a little bit of clipping in the death animation, but this is pretty significant. How the hell do I fix it? I'm not sure. The most apparent option is to enlarge the frame size and re-scale the zoom. But keeping the unit's scale just perfect with the rest would be extremely difficult... I have no choice but to try.
If there's ever going to be a clipping issue it's usually in the death animation. That's why I made ruinhorn's frames HUUUUGE. They had to be, or his wings clipped like nuts when he died. Luckily, this game can take multi-sized frames, unlike Starcraft and Diablo 2. All I have to worry about is keeping the size uniform between this and the old frames.
[imgwh 270x270]
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/7065/animation85.gif[/imgwh]
[imgwh 400x400]
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/5998/animation87.gif[/imgwh]
As perfect as I'll get it.
The added complication is that I'll have to manually re-center it when I go into the editor, since the size is different than that of the other animations. Otherwise this unit is done! Yay! Another brick in the golden road.
At this point the anti-psychotics are really taking effect, making me extremely tired and exhausted. But times like this, where I can concentrate and get work done, are rare. This is one such instance where I must sacrifice physical health for the sake of production. When I was actively writing my novel or modeling ships I'd stay up as long as I could keep working - sometimes even up to an entire week. But I can't do that anymore since I started taking these drugs as they absolutely
kill my alertness and ability to function, so production times are even harder to get going. I have to push on. I have to fight harder.
I planned to voice act the Avatar of Destruction sooner than later but now I am too tired to put that kind of energy into acting. I opt to make another graphic. After all, I need many of them. Each one counts.
What to make this time?
I'm going to make a unit for the Doom Prophets.
Doom Prophets are lead by Kraden, who is also known as the Son of Doom, and his demon sidekick Skeram, the Doom Prophet. They basically lead a cult of human converts who have sworn themselves to the Doom God, either accidentally through ignorance or willingly through betrayal. Once they've sworn themselves they can never break free from Skeram's psionic hold implanted in their brains, and they either turn into demons or become hosts for demons.
The lower rank of the Doom Prophets are humans, and as you go up in tiers, you encounter more and more twisted mutations until you reach true demons, the next brood of Doom's chosen.
Requiem presents us with the unique opportunity of using Bartuk for Corrupt. They are humanoid but have very dark skin color, just like the Corrupt Rogues in D2 and some other graphics, and they have a lot of spikes. They're big and burly, and have very brutish animations. Absolutely perfect for what we're after.
I'll be making a female graphic this time around, taking advantage of one of the more unique mace models available in the game. Bartuk female armor is exceptionally revealing and perfect for the prose of the Doom Prophets. Actually, Requiem's female armor in general adheres to the trope of chainmail bikinis. Again, perfect for LoL, that aims to abuse these cliches and tropes as much as possible. Just like the dudes will be
insanely heavily armored when it comes to top-tier units and the weapons are outrageously huge and pointy.
But also keep in mind, these guys are basically half-demons now. Armor at this point is just for show. Kind of like the Undead in my novel...
[imgwh 640x346]
http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/ ... tuMesk.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x400]
http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/ ... tuMesk.jpg[/imgwh]
In my novel, which takes place in the Lour Saga universe and is totally different from LoL, the Undead represent the pinnacle of terror campaigns. Their ships are created out of elemental energy and some of them are larger than entire star systems. They defy physics we as humans understand it, and they use their ability to shape their ships as such into terrifying images and abominations. Undead are all about gorging upon the emotions of fear and sadness, and few things will inspire more fear than Undead warships. They are literally the chariots of hell itself.
While I know in general what it is I want, there is a large variety of Bartuk armor that will fit the role of my axe-wielding vixen. Actually most of it is fairly similar to each other, varying only in scale of bulkiness and pointless as well as color. At this point I haven't truly defined what colors represent the Doom Prophets; Blue and Silver represent humans, Silver/white Elves, Gold and sky-blue/white Loladins, Black/red for Orcs and Bloodstone, so on so forth. Most Doom Prophets have darker skin as a result of their demonic blood, but their armor for the most part will be gray or black. Because DARK means EVIL. That's what Fantasy has taught us, anyways. A cliche we absolutely must abuse whenever possible.
[imgwh 640x360]
http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/5845 ... mr0803.jpg[/imgwh]
Bartuk Male armor is on the opposing extreme of the table - it sometimes becomes bulky enough to resemble Space Marine power armor. With this in mind I plan to reskin some of it and use it for the Loladin Ascendants race, specifically for the Space Pope top-tier melee unit. While I could just as easily use it for the Doom Prophets as well, I want to keep the theme of dudes turning into demons as time progresses, and most of the late-game Doom Prophet units will be true demons or witches or such.
On second thought I think I am going to pass out. I just can't function right now. I'll resume writing this when I wake up....!
Until then, have some MUSIC
Sounds of Throne of Armageddon, my novel, in relation to the Undead and Guola (The Devil).
Darksiders Wrath of War OST - Eden
Extended Edtion: Sacred Dark (Tekken 6)
~
Give or take 3 and a half hours and we're back! Yay!
Where was I? Ah yes, my curiously attractive killing machine for the Doom Prophets. Now, I can use the Knight's scene for his death animation and everything will be scaled correctly. This still has the modified lighting, but Bartuk skin is really dark... so we shall see how it works out as-is.
I thought she'd be a little bigger than the Knight because Bartuk are larger in-game but she's actually smaller. Not quite sure why that is. I can rescale the frames a bit lightly...
[imgwh 500x500]
http://img805.imageshack.us/img805/4517/image1h.jpg[/imgwh]
Gonna make damn sure I don't run out of any space for her like I did the Knight. Scale seems reasonable for what I want - she's not quite human anymore, anyways. I haven't decided on any particular armor, but I want a cross between heavy and light since she's mid-tier and not upper. Luckily most Bartuk Female armor has difficulty passing off as heavy to begin with. Oh how things work in our favor in the most silly of ways.
There's two things I am paying attention to in the armor, though.
- It has to be dark and evil looking, obviously.
- Since her skin is really dark the armor can't be so dark it blends in with her skin; it has to be really easy to identify on the small sprite.
I also need a name for her. Drats. This can get difficult sometimes. I need words that are not terrible like Blizzard's obsession with "Dark", "Void", and "Shadow".
Okay, got all the armor textures out, let's slap 'em in and...
wait what
[imgwh 640x378]
http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/9584/image4eo.jpg[/imgwh]
Umm.. What happened to the menu on the side?
It's this kind of random shit that really confuses me. How the hell do I get it back? Let's turn some buttons and press some knobs...
I pressed revert to startup layout and NOTHING CHANGED ARGH
...
Ok I restarted max and it's back. Yay!
[imgwh 640x378]
http://img815.imageshack.us/img815/7789/image6d.jpg[/imgwh]
Just another day at the office for Sir Edward Butts.
Everything becomes a blur after a while. Once you get things down it quickly becomes monotonous. That's the way with asset creation on this grand of a scale. But you can never lose sight of what it is you're trying to do.
As I said with the Hammerdin, the Human female's right-hand prop bone was in the incorrect position. Well, it is here as well, though it appears that it is aligned correctly at least.
BattleTanx: Global Assault (Music) - Champs Elysees
After a while all of the images of what I do turns into a stream of motion where I do not readily comprehend the details of what's going on. Only where things flow. I enter a mode of automation. This is the best of times, because it's hard to be distracted other than writing this article.
In a way, this unit will a reflection the Hammerdin if I use the mace I had in mind. Maybe I should use an axe...
[imgwh 640x400]
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/4813/30118567.jpg[/imgwh]
Now's a good time to mention that the dude couldn't make a script to re-center my diablo 2 graphics. From a programming perspective it is virtually impossible. I had figured as much, but I wanted to be certain. Ultimately this means that porting d2 graphics will be very painful, and chances are I might forgo using characters from the game altogether due to the difficulty when it takes less effort to get graphics out of Requiem. I planned to use d2 characters specifically for the Doom Prophets which, in hindsight, would be difficult to get to look in place with graphics such as this one.
Now I need to make absolutely sure her size is correct. I think she might be a bit too big.
[imgwh 500x500]
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/6008/animation9x.gif[/imgwh]
[imgwh 500x500]
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/9007/e0000.jpg[/imgwh]
Yes, too big. She needs to be only slightly larger than Loladin units.
[imgwh 500x500]
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/6093/90887005.jpg[/imgwh]
There we go!
Doom Prophets are going to be a bit of an interesting race. The mid-range units like this one will jump up in price from the basic units quite a lot, and late-game units will be quite expensive.
For the time being I've given her the tentative name of "Axeyslicey".
Guess we're ready to render.
Windows 7 has this extremely irritating bug where when you try to click on a folder in the folder list it instead goes to the one above it. God that pisses me right the fuck off.
Oh, she's not holding the weapon properly in the running animation. What the fuck do I do now?
[imgwh 606x198]
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/3953/image16hz.jpg[/imgwh]
With how often I run into this I'm not sure the importer imports this stuff correctly. Guess I'll just fix it manually...
Fixed it. Import stand animation - it's not in the offhand again! Revert to old setup (attack) and it's STILL not in the hand. Yes, this is irritating. Also, for some reason, there is only two special anims for 2h axes/maces - I KNOW there's more but I don't see them anywhere. :\
Earlier I said I'd talk about sounds. Then I got kind of sidetracked and now here we are again. That's usually how things go for me; I don't have any real structure of how I do things, even if I plan ahead. I tend to just do whatever comes to mind at the time.
With so much to do in terms of graphics it's easy to forget that I also need sounds. Now is probably the time I'd voice the Avatar of Destruction if only my anxiety wasn't acting up. When I get anxiety, which is most of the day, it becomes physically painful very quickly. My chest tenses to the point of producing sharp pain that extends to my fingers and toes. It also effects my ability to think. So for the time being I guess I'll talk about the AoW2 editor itself.
Since I was pretty conservative regarding Axeyslicey's frame counts I only have two sets to worry about - 0 and 600. This is also in part because she has no casting animations; a byproduct of most of her large 2h weapon anims clipping or not looking very good. I
swear there were others... maybe I'll have to check the other folders. Also, her Gethit and Death animations don't really transition from stand very well. The game uses a bipedal animation blending system much like WoW, but unlike WoW seems more dependent on it for blending upper body anims in certain transitions. The results are less than ideal conditions, but I can't really complain that much.
[imgwh 381x372]
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/9912/image18l.jpg[/imgwh]
For the time being I settle on the name Blood Knight. I'll probably change it later on since I have a better concept for the Blood Knight anyways, but this will do for a placeholder.
At the 325 cost range this puts her around tier 4. That means that she is in competition with the Doom Hunter, a demonic unit with physical resistance and very high attack. She won't have Physical Resistance or a very high attack, so she'll need some attributes that make her as inviting as the other melee choices.
I can't control the bonus stats units get when they level, but I can give them permanent buffs in the form of abilities that raise their stats. I can't change what those abilities give, either.
[imgwh 376x367]
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/4748/image20g.jpg[/imgwh]
Her attack is lower than the Doom Hunter's and her damage higher. However, her burst potential is not quite that of the Hammerdin, who has 18 damage as well as Charge on silver (makes his initial strike stronger). Like the Hammerdin, though, she has Wounding Attack - this makes her attacks have a chance to inflict -3 attack and damage on an enemy unit for a short duration. She also has Vorpal Weapon, which gives additional damage vs "Mounted" units - this was originally Polearm but I have to figure out a better name for the ability that makes units vulnerable to it (Maybe for casters/rangers?) Her defense is also higher than the Doom Hunters due to her smaller frame and light armor. Resistance remains fairly low, though, and she can't move as far (though 4 more than the Hammerdin).
On silver she gets Death Strike, which adds the Death element type to her attack, as well as Fury, a buff that gives her +2 Damage and Willpower. On Gold she gets Fire Strike and Unholy/Holy Champion which gives her bonuses to good-aligned/evil-aligned units.
Again, making units truly unique from each other is not going to be possible. Without being able to edit most of the abilities much less create entirely new abilities or abilities based on old ones, I can only do so much. While this will play totally differently from AoW2 vanilla it will still have some of the same issues.
[imgwh 490x353]
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/4971/image22ud.jpg[/imgwh]
The Doom Prophets still don't have nearly enough units to be playable even as a demonstration. But it's a step forward.
I still say they look like a mess in still frames. *shrug*
After such a post you are probably thinking that this is a hell of a lot of work for something I won't even be releasing to the public. You want to know why it is I devote my time to this. Don't you?
Without getting too much into anything, in short I am doing this to prove to myself I can actually do something still after so many years into deep depression and psychosis. This is my life, I have nothing else. I have challenged myself with a most impossible task.
Sleep time yay~
Okay, it's time to do this voice.
I use Adobe Audition 1.5 for my sound engineering. It is unrivaled in power and simplicity. Later versions exist; other audio editors in the modding community have told me they are bloated/inefficient but they work fine for me. I prefer 1.5 because that is where all of my presets are saved, and because I can use scifideluxe, a old Cooledit 2000 plugin. I also have SPACEMAN, another plugin for cooledit 2000 that I had gotten to work previously, which is used by Hollywood to generate com static and such, but it doesn't seem to function in Windows 7. This is a significant loss as making com static otherwise is very difficult to do properly.
Upon initial voicing the first thing I do is clean it, obviously. This is easily done.
[imgwh 640x371]
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/9258/image2mbe.jpg[/imgwh]
For some reason there is a LOT of background noise this time around. I select a portion of the audio containing only the background noise and capture the noise profile.
I then go into Noise Reduction and apply a max strength noise reduction with this profile. If there is a lot of background noise this can notably distort audio. In such an instance you can manually play around with the settings to find the best balance.
[imgwh 540x486]
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/7890/image4bi.jpg[/imgwh]
I do this a second time - for some reason my mic is picking up extra static after my words.
One of my techniques for my deeper voices is to apply a very specific flange previous to other effects, specifically the pitch shift. This flange on its own is not very significant but works with the shift and my specific sounding voice to create a very unique sound after the pitch shift. I'll also be applying a custom DirectX flange as well.
[imgwh 222x187]
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/6388/image6bm.jpg[/imgwh]
Developing flanges and effects is hard when you don't know what many of the terms used in advanced sound engineering mean. It turns into trial and error and using your hearing to sense very subtle changes which can result in very dramatic changes over the course of an overall process, especially when you play with stretches and shifts. Flanges that generate repeating signals and changes will get stretched outwards and sound totally different when you pitch shift.
[imgwh 640x490]
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/8374/image8dm.jpg[/imgwh]
This stupid fucking window appears every time I use a DirectX effect or Scifi Deluxe, even if all I do is open the menu then close it without actually doing anything.
[imgwh 607x336]
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9094/image10fi.jpg[/imgwh]
I have two mics - an Condensor and a Dynamic. The Condensor is just your standard mac microphone (USB, I don't use a mac ooololol), around $60. It yields great quality but picks up a lot of background noise, so I typically don't use it for voice acting since I got my Dynamic a few years ago. The Dynamic is a Samson QU-1 (also USB - Phantoms are expensive dawg) which costed me around $70 or so CAD. Suitable as an entry-level studio mic I imagine, it gives great quality but my settings on windows and such aren't perfect and for some reason it's picking up a lot of background noise right now. I have a pop screen and such but no place to put them so I don't use them for the time being.
One day when I have spare money (I'm on disability, it's the only money I'll ever have) I'll buy a big ol' shiny mic. For the moment though it wouldn't make a tremendous difference.
With just the flanges, and then with the flanges and stretch, the voice sounds very flat and terrible like that produced by most games. There's two ways you can fix this - either through EQ which is what I did in the past, or through Dynamics Processing, which is an extremely powerful way of playing with volumes. I have created a set of profiles catered to my specific voice that function well across most pitch levels. Ultimately it is the Dynamics Processing that will give this voice the thump of power.
This is typically where I go back and play with the secondary flange until I get exactly what I want. The UD effect I was using does not work well at all with the attack sounds or the softly spoken voice. I attempted another experimental Dx effect and achieved nothing better. Now I am trying the Xy`Kranasha Kato effect, this is one I applied to weapon sounds in The Black Sun for their mechanical-esque trailing reverb.
I decide to keep the Kato effect and apply an extremely powerful Wave Hammer compressor. I am not sure how this particular DirectX tool works, but it also plays around with the volume a bit. That added a bunch of static; I try an alternate one. Works good.
Now to add finishing touches. I'll add a reverb to give him that booming sound, and then a slight echo for his GODLINESS. Hard limit back to max normalization. Chances are for his gethit and death I'll mix something from external sounds until I get my volume fixed.
I apply an additional DirectX-based pitch shift to his attack sounds.
Here is an idea of how it sounded during various stages of my experimenting.
Doom's First Experimental Voice - Chronological Experiments
Chances are somewhere down the line I will redo this voice entirely, but as I haven't acted for a while I need to do it repeatedly to practice. For starters I need to fix the volume - the peaks are getting raped in the attack sounds and the attack sounds need to be redone anyways.
That tends to be how things go; I keep doing it over and over again until I am content with what I have.
Like graphics, like writing, like modding and gaming itself - all things require practice to perfect, all things require time to understand.
Nothing is easy.
Except for WoW?
[imgwh 640x400]
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/9273/w ... 155151.jpg[/imgwh]
Well, okay, even WoW definitely isn't easy.
