A little while ago I was chatting with Eduardo Vaisman about how he works with REAPER for his audio work at Ubisoft Toronto on games such as Splinter Cell Blacklist and Far Cry 4. I convinced Eduardo to write something up on how his team works in REAPER making demon voices for the Far Cry 4 Shangri-La missions, and why REAPER was the clear choice over Pro Tools HD.
Before we get into the article I want to thank Eduardo for sharing this knowledge with the community, and thank Ubisoft for permission to use the sounds and images in this article.
Three years ago, while working on the sound for Splinter Cell Blacklist at Ubisoft Toronto, a teammate suggested me to try REAPER, we all were using other DAWs at that point.
I’ll gave it a try, downloaded Kenny Gioia’s tutorials from Groove3.com and after two weeks of transition and few additional days for migrating my latest sessions and adjust macros, actions and shortcuts I kissed Pro Tools goodbye after 16 years of intensive use for my everyday work. Now 85% of Ubisoft Toronto Audio Team uses REAPER.
After Splinter Cell, I was assigned as Audio Team Lead in Far Cry 4 in charge of the sound of Shangri-La missions.
Competitive advantage
Some features from REAPER that helped me to streamline my workflow were:
Regions: I’m using them to build assets and export them properly named. Name convention is a big deal in game audio since you have to manage thousands of assets for
debugging and technical reasons, creating the sounds under regions allowed me to iterate and render, keeping consistency in the filenames and using the region manager to navigate fast in a session with dozens of sounds in them.
SWS Extensions: This is a must, the use of label processor to easily rename consecutive assets like selecting all the items and typing “SFX_WEP_Machete_Impact_Flesh_/E” auto-numbered all the variations for this sound in a breeze.
The snapshots are also invaluable when it comes to creating several versions of the same assets for the creative director to choose.
Record Output Options: When creating ambiances I have several track or session templates where I used Kontakt, Iris, Reaktor and other synths/samplers to create textures, the ability of right clicking the REC button and select “record output Stereo” let me record all sort of improvisations and parameter tweaking while performing those instruments and get audio recording instead of MIDI. (This is not the only approach you can have but it worked very fast for me).
I think every DAW out there has something to offer to the professionals and was created with a special workflow in mind so it caters better certain kind of industry (music, film post, etc.)
What makes me choose and recommend REAPER to every game audio professional is its flexibility to constantly changing pipelines, its speed and portability. There are no standards in a way a video game is done (different engines, different team sizes, different middleware, different pipelines) so for me the argument that a certain DAW is a “standard” doesn’t cut it.
In a collaborative working environment like Ubisoft Toronto, I can ask some programmers to write custom actions of REAPER for me using Python and Eel. That kind of “openness” in an audio tool is, in my humble opinion, what gives REAPER the competitive advantage.
REAPER in Shangri-La
The Shangri-La missions are 5 missions in a world based on the imaginary myths and legends of Kyrat where you play a mythical warrior “Kalinag” on his quest to free the bells of enlightenment, chained by a demon and restore harmony to the world.
This assignment has the fantastic challenge of creating ambiances, voices, weapons, creatures and magical effects, a sound designer’s dream.
To give you an idea of the fantasy world Eduardo’s team created, have a look at this gameplay footage.
I kissed Pro Tools goodbye after 16 years of intensive use for my everyday work. Now 85% of Ubisoft Toronto Audio Team uses REAPER.
The voices of Shangri-La
To create the voices of the demons that attack you and try to destroy Shangri-La, I used Hindi actresses performing the demonic voices and then I processed them using a mix of REAPER and external plugins.
Here’s the starting point clean vocals
Processing started with ReaPitch where the right combination of pitch algorithm and tweaking the formant gave me a range of variations that I couldn’t get using other pitch plugins without getting too digital before reaching my goal. Then using ReaRoute I output the signal to Dehumaniser Pro, an external application to process voices, where I applied animal convolution, granular synthesis and throat filter to give every enemy’s archetype its own personality.
The output of Dehumanizer was sent back to REAPER using another channel of ReaRoute and using the input FX chain I applied EQ and dynamics before printing the result in a track.
Here are the same clips after processing
Links:
Eduardo Vaisman – https://www.linkedin.com/pub/eduardo-vaisman/14/897/290
Far Cry 4 – https://www.ubisoft.com/en-US/game/far-cry-4/
Dehumaniser Pro – http://dehumaniser.com/dehumaniser-pro/
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