Let's Build the RPG! - 17 - Unreal Engine 5 Environment Ambient Sound - Blueprint Audio Tutorial

In this episode, we set up a flexible environmental sound blueprint that you can then use in your scenes with any sound and attenuation settings you need. You'll learn the basics of environmental sound, including sound cues, attenuation, and spatialization settings. We also cover collision volumes in the blueprint, and how collision overlap events can be used to trigger the sound. At the beginning I go through my 2 favorite sources of free sound content. This episode is meant as an introduction to working with sound in Unreal Engine 5.

Link to spreadsheet of all sounds used in this episode (and everything else used in this series, up to episode 17):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zyRUVLmHgI9Aog29U8bysbspmU3Fptpx/

00:00 Intro
00:12 Today's Goals and Key Concepts
01:20 Sources for free sound content and prepping sounds for UE5
03:06 Why a blueprint is necessary
04:00 Sound cue
06:03 Sound attenuation
09:49 Ambient sound blueprint
21:32 Setting up spatialized attenuation
24:42 Conclusion

I never actually stopped playing sounds in the blueprint upon ending the overlap- this is probably a good idea to do for performance reasons, although it's not going to matter unless you have a ton of sounds all playing together in the scene.


New episode released every Saturday morning!



My favorite sources for free sound content:

https://www.zapsplat.com/
Zapsplat has higher quality sounds in general than freesound.org

https://freesound.org/
Freesound.org has a TON of free sounds, though most of them are lower quality. I typically use freesound.org if I'm looking for a more obscure sound



Direct References

Sound Cue Editor:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/sound-cue-editor-in-unreal-engine/

Sound Attenuation:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/sound-attenuation-in-unreal-engine/

Sound Spatialization:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/spatialization-overview-in-unreal-engine/



Additional references

Audio in Unreal Engine 5:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/audio-in-unreal-engine-5/