Explanation of Wwise-Unreal Workflow?

I’m new to using Wwise and Unreal, I’ve read all their documentation and as much as I can find and it still doesn’t really make sense to me. I have a few questions regarding the workflow between wwise and Unreal:

  • Do we create events and soundbanks in wwise, and then export them to Unreal? How does Unreal know about these events?
  • Or do we create Event/Soundbank assets in Unreal, and wwise detects them and hooks up to it?
  • How are soundbanks from wwise connected to soundbank assets in Unreal?
  • What does “build soundbanks” from Unreal actually do? Does it affect wwise? Is building soundbanks in wwise not required at all?

Hi Ben,

I know this is old, but wanted to resolve, for anyone else wondering and also because I’ve had many questions answered by stumbling in to your blog :).

This is the basic flow:
Quick Start (audiokinetic.com)

Tldr; is that you create content in Wwise, events, banks, switches, RTPC etc.
The easiest way to interact with the wwise content is via the wwise pickers in Unreal, you can drag an event directly from the wwise tree into your content browser or the level and it will create a UAKAsset that is basically just a wrapper of the Event in wwise, referencing the Id of the event in the wwise project/stored in the soundbanks.

Building soundbanks in unreal actually calls wwise via command line (or their Waapi protocol, depending on your integration) to build soundbanks in the same way that you would in the authoring tool, so building in either location should be the same…

It is super important for your project settings in the Wwise project and the Unreal project to have the exact same generatedSoundBanks set though, else you will get some strange error about Platform being None…