Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Atlantis

Under the sea. Under the sea.

Key Features:
Caustics everywhere. Needed to plus up the caustics effect from 20,000 Leagues, since it would be everywhere. I found I could get a great effect of chromatic separation just be pre-separating the channels in the source voronoi noise texture. It’s an incredibly cheap way to get a nice effect.

Underwater lighting. Both the daytime level and nighttime levels are lit with white light. This allowed me to apply tinting to the lighting after the fact to give me more control over the coloration based on depth from the player. Underwater photography always has a lamp to light the scene close to the camera, and I wanted to use a similar look here. Initially I used the math of a point light, emanating from the camera, but later simplified it to just be a simple distance range, to make it more subtle. Since the level was lit white, it was easy to have it be less blue close to the player, where more vibrant colors could come through, and then aggressively tint everything blue at a short distance, to create a nice separation between foreground and background. Earlier versions of the daytime scene were dimmer and moodier, but in the end I amped it all up in an unrealistic way, to maintain the lighthearted vibe of the game.

Bioluminescence at night. The concept here was to make just about everything in the scene glow and emit light. I modified the shader specifically for this, so it could use custom texturing and parameters for only the light bake, and not rendered to the surface. Typically, if you made the shading emissive enough to cast this much light, the source geometry would just look flat or blown out, which is fine for a light bulb, but isn’t what I wanted for this. Instead, I have the geometry cast a lot of light onto the environment and itself, but display no emission on the surface. The end result gives the nice impression of more complex and layered surfaces, with light not emanating from its surface, but instead from within it.

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.