Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Labyrinth

My 7th course. It was easy to get excited to be working with the Jim Henson company. I’m happy to say they loved everything we showed them, and now we’ve landed a spot in the Jim Henson Museum. How cool is that?

Key Features:
A cinematic flare. This course had more involved lighting than most previous. To get the look, it required much more “fake”, theatrical lighting. This is most prominent in Hole 17, often called the “Escher Room”, where I mimicked the look seen in the movie, using spotlights to sculpt the light is way similar to how Escher would shade a drawing.

The crystal ball. Hole 18 in the daytime course was particularly fun. I created the illusion of walking into an infinite void, complete with an abstract and ominous, animated cubemap. The hole was incased in the glass ball that uses cubemaps to fake reflection and refraction of the surrounding environment. Working our level designer and animator Henning Koczy, we created a grand finale to the level where the ball would shatter into pieces as lightrays and star flares would burst out towards the player. I loved designing that effect.

A lack of glitter. Some things didn’t make it to release for performance reasons. I had a glitter effect in the level shader that would pepper in little splashes of glitter all over the place, a key feature when observing the movie. Unfortunately it added a few too many pixel calculations and just wouldn’t run well on Quest.

We used a thick fog in the night course. Since there are numerous underground sections, Lucas Martell added a system to dynamically change the fog thickness and height when you enter different areas.

The most candles. We never had so many candle flames before in a course. Luckily the flame meshes and shader are lightweight, and hundreds of them can be combined into a single mesh.

Spiraling clouds in the sky. I wanted to move away from using shader clouds and return to hard geometry for this sky. These clouds required a special shader to help blend them into the sky cubemap. The issue being that they could be viewed from many angles, and the sky coloration changes drastically depending on which way you’re face (more ominous and dramatic towards the castle, and a friendly calm towards your home), so the clouds needed to blend with this coloration accordingly.

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.