Into The Frying Pan

Hello and welcome to my second blog post. Within this post I will be going over the process of creating the sounds for the UDK Lava Map. I have included all the sounds and a video down below to help you better understand my sound design process and implementation. Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy.


While coming up with the overall sound design for the Lava Map I wanted to give it the feel of being under constant attack from a creature that was mistakenly released. What I choose to fulfill this is various explosions and gunfire mixed in with a creature.  In the background through out the whole map the player can hear the gunfire and explosions that seem to be off in the distance. I achieved this effect by processing the sounds using pitch modulation and slowing it down slightly with a time shift. To give it a punchier sound in game I used UDK’s own pitch setting to bring both sounds down a little more. The result is a realistic battle going off somewhere else in the map.

For the creature I went a different route. Rather that just being heard everywhere I wanted to give the player the sense that it was moving around within the walls. TO achieve this I placed various stingers throughout the map and deep within the walls as to not have the creature sound as if it was right on top of the player. To give the creature a more menacing tone I once again used UDK’s own pitch settings and pitched the roar down.

The ambience I chose to give the cave is to make the cave seem large and mostly empty but at the same time make it feel as if was alive. With the lava flowing around and producing heat the cave needed to have the sense of the cold on hot air moving around fighting for space. With that, as the player walks around he’ll encounter various fires of different sizes. While essentially the same sound, each fire was pitched up (for the small ones) or down (for the big ones) with UDK pitch settings to give them their own unique feel.

With so much lava around the player is bound to accidently step into it, but there was only a small grunt to indicate this. To solve this I created a burn type sound to tell the player he has just been damaged by the lava. This sound is very simple and is mixed in with the grunts for added effect. To heal the damage sustained the player needs a health kit, so for this I created a pickup sound to tell the player he has just been healed. This sound is not distracting to the player but he will instantly know he picked some health up within the action.

From here I will describe how each sound was made. Beginning with the ambience I recorded a laptop-cooling fan at high RPM’s. I processed this sound through an EQ and slowed it down with a time shifter plugin. This gave it a nice deep sounding feel to it and the effect of hot air moving around.
The background firefight where the recordings of machine guns and grenades going off.  The grenades where ran through a pitch shifter and time shifter to make them sound punchier and heavier, these sounds were pulled from Full Sails sound effect library. The creature was a sound effected used were from Full Sail University’s sound library, these were simply ran through a pitch shifter to give it a deeper tone.

The elevator sounds seen and used in game where 3 layers of sounds mixed in together. These sounds with a mechanical pulley wheel and some thick rope being compressed and stretched. For the up motion the sound is played normally, for the down motion however, the sound was played in reverse. Once again the sounds used to create this were from Full Sail. The health pickup is also my ammo pickup but just pitched up a few semi-tones to give it a new sound but still keep in-line with the feel of the ammo pick-up.

The lava was a challenge and comprises a few different layers. What makes up the lava sound is dry ice, rocks tumbling and a small barrel burning. I processed the rocks through a time shifter over and over again then pitched down heavily to give off a nice slow rumbling that lava would produce. The dry ice was used to give the burning barrel and rocks more depth, it was EQ’ed to get rid of the high end frequencies and to bring up the low end with some time shifting to slow it down. The barrel was ran through an EQ and time shifter to bring down some of the high end and slow it down just a hair.
The lava burn is white noise generated sped up and pitched down to give a quick burn type of sound. All these sounds were used from the sound library at Full Sail University with the exception of the white noise which was made in Audacity.

For the various fires seen around the map their sound was made using the recording of a campfire. UDK’s in-game pitch settings allowed me to alter the sound in order to create the effect of multiple different fires of different sizes. Last but not least, the cave has an over reverb placed over it to simulated the echoes of large cave. This was done using UDK reverb settings.

I hope you have enjoyed my post for my Lava Map sound design. It was certainly exciting to have all the sounds I have made come together and working within the map. Please continue to follow Ryder Sound Design, as we will constantly bring you up to date with our latest projects and great sounds. Thanks again for stopping by and stay shiny.