Adding Audio: Making the Characters Speak! (Game Dev Day 56)

Moving onto the next cutscene, we will be introducing our playable character and the situation they are in. This will require adding a voice over track to the cutscene and syncing it up with the animations for the actors and the cameras.

The entire cutscene is a minute long, so I will be posting the completed one in a future article once all of the animation and AI is completed.

First off, I blocked out the new cutscene, covering all the appropriate camera shots I would need before adding the audio. I also animated the cameras to pan and rotate in accordance with the director’s notes.

Fade in to the beginning of the cutscene.

I made sure my cutscene was roughly the same length as the audio for the part. It is simple to edit the camera shots to match the audio once audio is added, refining the scene.

Timeline pre audio.

To add audio to the cutscene, we need two new empty gameobjects; one to hold the voice over, and the other to hold the background music.

I placed both inside ANOTHER empty gameobject labled audio to keep things organized.

Add Audio Sources “Voice Over” and “Background Music”.

You do NOT need to add an audio clip, the audio will be played through timeline.

Next, I added two audio tracks to the Timeline, one for each audio source.

Drag the appropriate gameobject into each source box, then drag the audio file you want into the Timeline for each row.

Viola! the audio will now play as the cutscene plays. All that is left is fine tuning the camera shots to make sure they line up with the appropriate audio.

Final Timeline.