How much can Unreal Engine and MetaSounds do? Developer and artist Matt Spendlove has created a complete open source polysynth that roughly replicates the AudioKit Synth One using Unreal’s internal tools.
You can grab this creation and run it for free, and Unreal Engine is free for most uses. But this is immediately great because it shows one thing that isn’t so obvious in MetaSounds, which is how to patch polyphony. Check it out – complete with nice UI and a pretty oscilloscope powered by the Niagra particle engine:
Before you get started, check out Matt’s excellent MetaSounds tutorial on the Epic Learning Portal:
Introduction to MetaSounds (Epic Games Community Site)
This comprehensive learning guide comes with an accompanying GitHub repository full of examples:
Project files for the official Epic Developer Community course
It doesn’t cover all the latest features, but it’s up to date on all the basics and offers the best learning guide available.
From there, though, it’s worth taking a look inside MetaSynthOne – kudos to the AudioKit team. (To be clear, AudioKit doesn’t run in Unreal Engine – this was just an example inspired by their free sample.)
There’s a lot here – this not only solves the question of polyphony, but also how to create custom source engines and how to interact with the UI (and visualization). As Matt writes:
As of August 2024, MetaSounds does not support polyphony out of the box, so you will need to develop your own solution. While MetaSounds supports some native interaction with the wider engine, first-class support for other core features of UE5 (e.g. sequencers and blueprint scripting) requires MS to be included in a blueprint. The reference implementation of MetaSynthOne presented here summarizes this infrastructure and enables easy integration with Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) to create user interface widgets to control the synth engine at runtime.
In short, I now have an extensible way to design custom MetaSound Source sound engines, hook them up to gameplay interactions, and publish custom UI widgets that let me tweak the sound in real time. I can also do “offline” sound design to create standalone presets for later recall.
As of this writing, it’s not quite ready to integrate into your own projects or modify yourself. As Matt suggests, it’s better to just look around and use it as a reference for your own creations. But it’s ready to play with. Just resist the temptation to use the download button and actually work through the Git interface (desktop or CLI) instead. (In fact, you should get into the habit of doing this with developer projects in general – downloading breaks a lot of things due to submodules and the like.)
Oh, and Matt convincingly promises that there is more to come, with this repository providing a home for future, as-yet-unannounced examples. And yes!
MetaSounds Synth Repo (GitHub)
Previously:
