I used to have some EXTREMELY BAD sessions that not only made exporting and iterating a headache, but were totally confusing to me when opened up months later. Needless to say they were also confusing to any of my poor teammates who might have needed to access my sessions.
When I decided to commit to improving my session organization, I ended up 100% switching to Reaper from Pro Tools. I'm not saying everyone has to switch to Reaper for improved organization, but I really liked its ability to organize tracks into folders and sub-folders. On top of that, learning a new DAW was a great way to change my bad habits while relearning everything.
Now that I've settled on an organized approach that I like, I'll share it here.
First, I set up my session with a high-level idea of how I'll be implementing the designed sounds in Wwise. The first tracks I make are sounds that I know will be implemented as their own events. Those will be the folders- or parent tracks as I call them- with the various layers that make up that event's sounds as child tracks under that folder.
Ok, so let's say I have events A B and C. I create tracks and label them with the events, then color code these parent tracks so they're easy to differentiate.
Two really nice things I get right at the start here is 1) if I solo the a folder, everything contained within it is solo'd and 2) as you can see in the screenshot below, I can minimize the tracks contained in a folder (with the action Track: Cycle folder collapsed state) in a way that really helps de-clutter the session if I'm not actively working on the content in a folder.
When I want to create tracks within that folder I use a custom action that creates a child track then color codes it with the parent track's color. This uses some SWS actions. If you don't have the SWS extension yet, I highly recommend getting it.
Within the event parent track you can have sub-folders that help organize the tracks even further. I make a lot of sub-folders, and usually they represent layers I know will need to be separate voices in Wwise due to looping behavior, bus routing needs, blending behavior, etc.
My most common sub-folders tend to be "Stereo" and "Mono" since they need to be exported separately and handled differently in Wwise. Within those I have my actual design layers/tracks. I might do some more color-coding here- anything that helps me quickly identify what I'm looking for is great.
It's a good idea to establish color-coding rules with yourself to quickly identify various tracks and effects you might want to differentiate. I use a lot of instrument plug-ins that I might share across folders so I keep those outside of my parent track hierarchy, color-coded and with a descriptive track name. When using those instruments I record the audio output and then drag the clip into the proper sub-track. Because of that method I have to be really good at saving presets frequently and descriptively though!
Time to export! You have multiple options here. Reaper has a beautiful thing called Region Render Matrix where you can set regions around your content and variations and export everything in one go into separate files, using wildcards for track naming. Sometimes my regions numbers get all over the place depending on the nature of the session, so I tend to name the regions themselves for variation numbering i.e "01" and using the wildcard $region. This process is so dang flexible and I encourage you to figure out the way you like to do it!
Personally I like to manually mute/solo my folders when exporting, sometimes without regions, because I might not be exporting enough to warrant the setup process in the Region Render Matrix.
Now there is an important step in speedy iteration with these exports specifically in Wwise. I will always name my exports exactly the same through iterations, overwriting the file, because then I can overwrite the file in the Wwise Originals folder and not have to worry about re-importing and re-organizing the sound in Wwise. You do have to be careful here and make sure that your Source Control is marking those files as modified.
Lastly! Keep in mind that I'm doing all of this nice organization not only to speed up my export process, but also so I can return to a session months later and not be confused. Any additional rules/standards helps with that. With that in mind, I use item mutes when I'm not sure I want a particular sound, and track muting only for auditioning/exporting purposes. That way I can go back to an old session and know exactly what was intentionally muted and what was left muted because of what I was monitoring the time that I last saved the project.
Alright, that's all I have for now. I really hope it was useful for someone. Everyone has a different way of doing things but I hope y'all are encouraged to organize your stuff! My sessions used to be nightmares and it took me soooo long to export because of that. Now it's not an obstacle so I can focus on designing.
This post was originally a thread on Twitter, which you can find here:
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