Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Sweetopia

The 5th course I worked on. I recommended early on that we abandon the hard edge look for only this course. In order to get the right look of glossy hard candy, translucent gummies, and puffy cotton candy trees, we’d need a softer, smoother surface quality.

Key Features:
Candy surfaces. To keep things light, our levels usually stick to a single texture combined with a lightmap. But here we wanted a variety of surface types. In order to do this I created a shader with several predefined candy rendering styles that would be selected based on which part of the texture sheet they were using. The translucent hard candy and gummies are my favorite. Blending in the reflection probe cubemap, flipped, I created the illusion of light penetration through the candies.

Chocolate river. When I made the river shader for Quixote Valley, I always had it in mind that it could be adapted to look like chocolate. The new addition here was the floating marshmallows. To keep it light, they use the same water shader, with the same waves but mapped to a single point. This allows them to bob with the water without any animation or physics.

Swirling clouds. An evolution of my clouds shader from Shangri-La. Instead of a noise pattern, they could be laid out in a fluffy spiral. The rest of the sky coloration is defined by a hand painted cubemap, as with the other levels. With my cubemap fog shader, those unique sky colors can blend with the level geometry, tying it all together.
Rim lighting. The addition of rim lighting (a clamped fresnel blended with the existing lightmap and reflection probe) really helped the night level pop. In the reflection probe, the heart moon is made much larger and brighter to really highlight the edges.
Puffy smoke. The smoke stacks on the factory needed a puffier looking smoke so I came up with a simple shader/particle combination that creates the appearance of complicated smoke patterns.

The taffy puller. In the factory we have a spinning taffy puller obstacle. To help sell the illusion, the taffy has a surface texture that swims in reverse, counter animating the puller, as the taffy deforms up and down the posts. It helps suggest that it’s elastic and not a static mesh.

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.