Soundtrack | Hannah Nazif

Soundtrack Drive

"Soundtrack Drive" originally started off as a cyberpunk style racing environment, but eventually became a dreamy, lo-fi inspired city while the project continued and player feedback began to be implemented.

The sound visuals are driven by Unreal's Audio Synesthesia plugin, specifically the Loudness NRT analyzers.

The city buildings utilize Unreal's Procedural Content Generation Plugin.

Free Asset Credits:

Billboards: "Low-poly Billboard Pack" (https://skfb.ly/ouGyw) by staticcc is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Goldfish: "Ryukin goldfish" (https://skfb.ly/6TMC9) by somitsu is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Flowers: "Echinacea" (https://skfb.ly/pqvBF) by Cosmic_dust is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

All decal images and city material images were from Adobe Stock and modified in Photoshop for variations.

An Experimental Music Visualizer Environment

Donut Zone

After a user test, I got the feedback that I should have a place to do donuts. I decided to mark it accordingly. Another test had the recommendation of sprinkles falling from the sky which led to the complete tone shift and addition of other surreal elements to balance out the sprinkle rain.

There are two donut zones in the map.

Garden Zone

Donut decals were replaced with glowing flowers when I thought the city should have some greenery. I inserted glowing spheres into the flower models so they'd stand out and set up hanging particles to set the area further apart from the other zones.

Start Mural

The start of the experience has a bouncing billboard and a flickering mural with headphones to set the tone. The hanging particles are slightly off from the start and create a cool "warp speed" effect when the player drives past.

The large mural was originally its own focal point, though the other zones outshone it by the end.

Procedural City

Flickering decal experiment was in, and so was the start of my pavement material though it was stretched. The lighting for the night was bad though and needed some attention. The procedural city had also been set up in it's early form.

Before this screenshot, I was struggling to get the Houdini plugin to randomize my assets. I then realized that button wasn't available to me for some reason and finally moved to Unreal's PCG plugin.

Half of the reason why the cyberpunk theme got lost was the sheer amount of assets I'd need. You can see there are more free assets in my original progress shots that eventually got tossed aside when possible - many of these were harder to work with for the music visualization.

The raised road in this was also scrapped due to the spline mesh crashing the project numerous times on my laptop. If this had been the final layout it would've been fine, but the moment things changed I would've needed to remake the massive spline from scratch.

These are some of the first tests done with the engine. The layout test (on the right) proved to be necessary since the curved roads were hard to drive on and made everything much slower.

The music visualizer test was much more successful. I had originally followed the official tutorial for Unreal's synesthesia plugin, but then modified the outcome to also effect material parameters.

These were the original sketches for the project. The concept changed as I got feedback from friends and listened to a lot of lofi music. The original environment had more cyberpunk influence and had many decorations to imply it was a distraction while your mind was being controlled.

The wooden man decal was a remnant of this with the "red pill, blue pill" imagery as a subtle matrix reference