Hello all

I am trying to add some life to my forest exterior cells via some ambient sounds like the ones I hear while traveling through Skyrim. I would like to hear some nature animal sounds like birds chirping, etc. The only ones I have found in the creation kit that I can drag on to the render window I do not care for (like: AMBBirdTreeLP). In the Sound Discriptor section under Audio, I see some that I would like to use but I do not know how since they don't seem to be usable directly.

I did some research and found that most of the ambient sounds for exterior cells are usually done through the Region window? I cannot find any tutorials on that specifically or really any at all. Does anyone know of a tutorial or can give me an idea of how to use that Region window or possibly explain to me the best way to add these sounds that I want? I am unsure of how to use the Region window and am not quite comfortable experimenting with it, yet.

Much thanks in advance.

Sound descriptors will usually have a corresponding sound marker. This is the object that gets place into a world. I'm not familiar with the use of regions.

Thanks for responding so quickly. The particular Sound Discriptors that I like do not have a corrseponding Sound Marker that I can find. As an example of the Sound Discriptors that I do like are called AMBRBirdRiverwoodDay01SD and AMBRBirdRiverwoodNight01SD. So, if you know that actual Sound Marker names for them that would be great.

If there is no corresponding sound marker you can easily make a new one and point it to whichever sound descriptor you see fit.

Ok, I made a new one, added the descriptor to it and I got no sound from it in game. No matter which saved game or new game i tried, I couldn't get any sound to work. I set the descriptor to loop, envelope, none - conditions or none - dB variance up or down, I got nothing. *sigh* I guess I will have to try something else?

Anyone know about the Region tutorial?

Ambient sounds are done via regions. Create a region, define it's borders (Click around the map where you want it to be, then right click and say 'Done' to form the region), then go to the Sound Tab and drag sounds into the list. Then set the chance per second of them playing. (1.00 being 100% chance; .25 being 25% chance, etc) Make the 'bed' sounds like CricketsBed play constantly (Or wind bed, etc) while distinct noises like birds chirping and wind gusts play more like 4-12%.

For examples of what sounds you should use, look at vanilla regions for Skyrim like WeatherForestPine, WeatherForestFall, etc.

Setting up these noises in the Sounds tab of a region gives you great background noise and adds a lot of ambience and mood to your region.

This might be a problem with your Sound Output Model. Annoyingly trying to add new sounds into the game is usually at least a three-part process. Other than that I don't know what to tell you, I've had no problems making new sound markers and re-purposing existing sound descriptors for my needs, often I'll need to customize a Sound Output Model as well.

Have you tried placing other sound markers in your test area?

Note: A lot of sounds/sound descriptors have conditions so that they only play under certain circumstances. I.e. crickets only play at nighttime between certain gamehours.