Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Underwater environment? Giant sea creature? Yes please.

Key Features:
Water Caustics. This effect was absolutely necessary to sell the vibe. In the classic movie, they featured prominent caustics projecting in from the windows, and I love the effect. In addition to giving the appearance of being underwater, it also helps convey the motion of the sub, which is technically standing still as the background streams by. I had to find a fairly simple way to blend the effect in, so I setup the system to use lightmap color channels as masks, with the option for custom masks. What worked very well in this case was to use the lightmap’s Blue Channel minus the Red Channel. This way all the blue light gleaming in from the windows would automatically mask in the caustics, and the warm interior light would remove the effect. Without the subtraction, any amount of white light would introduce caustics where they weren’t wanted. From here, I could just design the level’s lighting to paint in the effect.

Giant Squid. The designer (Zach Alexander), modeler (Emma Mercado), and animator (Henning Koczy) did a great job on this guy. When I got to do a pass on his lighting, I wanted to use lightmaps, since it allows for much richer lighting than dynamic lights, with bounce light and shadows. Unfortunately, Unity wont lightmap Skinned Mesh Renderers To get around this, I made a shader that accepts a custom texture as a lightmap, and I created a matching light setup in Blender where I was able to bake to a texture. Unfortunately, Blender’s denoiser decided not to work on baked textures, so I used Blender’s build-in comping tool to feed the render through a denoising pass, and then kicking the denoised texture back out to the model to preview. Having an integrated compositing tool is so cool for simple tasks like this.

Light Cones. Expanding on the electric light glows I made for El Dorado, I modified the technique to work with cone-like meshes. The planes had to be UVed very precisely to perfectly synchronize the texture mapping for viewing from every angle. The amount of overdraw isn’t cheap, but it still works as a suitable standin for volumetrics on the weak hardware, and doesn’t have any blocky voxels, so it works pretty well.

My Role on Walkabout:
As Lead Technical Artist I worked both as our primary lighting/shader/fx artist and as a technician developing the tools and methods needed to achieve our vision, as well as optimizing the scenes to run well.

The target platform of Quest and Quest 2 made for some very interesting technical challenges. It requires rendering to multiple cameras, at high resolution, high frame rate, on mobile hardware. In addition, standard techniques involving Post Processes, URP Renderer Features, and additional cameras, are not options on that platform.

The artistic vision for each course, from both our designers and myself, would drive the methods and systems I created along the way.