Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Shangri-La

For the 4th course I worked on for Walkabout, I came up with a lightweight, cubemap colored, fake volumetric fog system that is used in all subsequent courses.

Key Features:
Tall mountains emerging from the fog. This simple concept led to the most important system I made for the game: fake volumetric fog. The fog receives its color from the sky’s cubemap texture and is manipulated based on the player and geometry positions, creating the illusion of volumetric fog, in a lightweight, global system that is very efficient to render on Quest. This system is used in all subsequent levels in Walkabout to add a visual richness that would otherwise be impossible on the platform.

An additional “fog zone” was added in the central pit of the stage. This area would be a denser pool of fog that conceals the giant bell above Hole 18. The player then walks down a treacherous walkway until they’re completely immersed in the fog.

Strings of flags and glowing lanterns blow in the wind. The wind system I created for plants in Quixote Valley worked nicely here.

In the nighttime course, thousands of paper lanterns fly up from the foggy abyss. Using a particle system with a mesh particles and custom shader, I was able to create the illusion that the paper lanterns were lit up from a flickering flame within them.

Also in the night course, I wanted a dramatic, dynamic sky. Clouds rolling over a glowing moon, with a chromatic glow shining through them. This is done with a custom skybox shader, without the need for any additional geometry.

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.