SOUND DESIGN

Rotors designed in Reaper, an engine tone isolated from a location recording with RX Spectral Repair (Partials + Noise), procedural wind using pink noise, and phase-aligned body layers, performed by a MetaSound driven by real-time Doppler and rotor directivity. A quick breakdown of the MetaSound layers are in the video below.

The engine loop is seamless by construction: matching 2.5 second regions from each end are cross-mixed, end to start and start to end, then phase aligned at the join so the exported loop cycles without any clicks or artifacts. The pitch of every layer rides one number: a Blueprint function library implementing the full two-term Doppler equation from the helicopter's and the listener's velocities. Reflections return through a quad convolution reverb using an Altiverb Industrial District impulse response, so the district answers back in surround as the aircraft passes.

Cloth movement for RedCell's characters, recorded from a military jacket: cotton shell and polyester lining rubbed together, performed at run and walk cadences. Captured Mid-Side with a Soundelux U195 mid and a Sphere DLX modeling a Neumann M49 figure-8 pair, so a single performance delivers both a mono-compatible mid for spatialized third-person playback and a decoded stereo image for first-person layers.

The session commits mid and decoded stereo as grouped tracks, so one edit pass rules both formats: 185 takes stripped, faded, and exported as paired mono and stereo files. Restoration ran through RX Spectral De-noise, and the finished library lands in BaseHead as UCS Foley/Cloth with the microphone chain documented in the metadata of every file.

A surface library built by hand: source samples edited, chopped, relayered, and EQ matched into consistent families for every movement type the Foley system performs. Walk, run, walk backwards, pivot, scuff, scuff pivot, jump, and land each get their own variation set per surface, so the footstep system always has the right energy for the motion.

Shell drops for pistol, rifle, and shotgun across concrete and grass, isolated one by one from source recordings, balanced, and separated into the phases the game actually triggers: impact, bounce, and settle. In the weapon MetaSounds each phase is its own variation pool, so a casing can hit, tumble, and spin down with energy that follows the physics instead of one baked take.

The generators humming through the industrial map started as a portable air conditioner: recorded with a kick drum microphone placed low against the housing, where the low end lives and the fan wash does not. A noise profile captured from the top of the unit subtracts the remaining wind, and the cleaned motor bed is layered with mechanical detail and steam into the running generator, placed in the level alongside buzzing fixture lights.

The RED CELL itself floats at the heart of the enemy headquarters, and my current game is named after it, so its voice had to feel alive. The core is an oscillating Moog, never perfectly still the way only analog isn't, widened and set in motion through a send chain. Over it, real electrical recordings performed against objects, stretched and granularized so the texture never repeats, mixed in Reaper into something synthetic but breathing.

The menu hover began as a study of a favorite: the main menu of Hell Is Us, whose hover reads like a struck ball, round and physical instead of synthetic. I recreated my own version using a recording of tapping on a paper notebook, shaped with heavy compression and saturation with the same character. The rest of the inventory menu was designed with Phase Plant and Serum using a number of effect plugins such as Fracture, resampled multiple times. I made these in a single session using a source video so that hover, click, select, equip, tabs, and back, sounded as a single material identity. Each menu sound also carries a matched DualSense haptic response, modeled on how these sounds should feel.

The ambience beds are built for true surround: mono channels isolated in RX from low sub-heavy wind and light rain on water, then loaded into Unreal as custom environment sounds for Ultra Dynamic Sky. Instead of one looping quad file, the bed MetaSound triggers four wave players at staggered times, so no two corners of the room ever phase-lock and the ambience never audibly cycles. On a 5.1 system the wind and rain sit around the listener as a field rather than a wall.