Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
El Dorado

A storm is coming…
My 6th course. I had a very clear idea how I wanted to handle both the day and night courses. For day time, a thick mist with prominent lightrays shining through, that you would emerge from as you travel above the tree canopy. And for night, a violent rain storm with active lightning.

Key Features:
Lightrays. These are done in a simple, classic way. A particle effect with long stretched particles and an additive shader. To really make it work, the key is in the texture, and fading them off based on player position and angle, so they never appear to be flat planes.

I revamped the height fog system here so it could transition between different cubemaps whether you were within or above the height fog. This allowed me to present a lush, green ambience under the canopy, and a bright sunny day above it.

For the night course, I needed to create a unified lightning system and combine it with my fog system. It’s all controlled by a single slider. When animated from 0 to 1, it produces a flash effect that lights up the environment, the rain, the clouds, and reduces the fog density. Seeing it in VR is quite striking.

There are more windy plants in this level than any before, and drastically increasing the wind speed and power, along with the choppiness of the waterfalls and streams, really helps sell the stormy vibe.

I wanted to move away from fire torches to light up the night course. I came up with a concept that we were seeing the remains of a modern exploration team, to contrast with the remains of conquistadors we see in the easy course. I designed a variety of electric lamps, scattered about the course. To sell the look, I had to adapt my glow technique to work on long tube lights. Adding a high frequency flicker to them really gave the look of LEDs.

I also had a bit of fun with flares, giving a deep red light to contrast the dark cold green of the level.

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.