Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Bogey’s Bonanza

This was the 1st course I worked on. My initial task was to identify and remove existing rendering bottlenecks for the game as a whole. I found and resolved the bottlenecks in the render pipeline, greatly boosting gpu performance. I then went to work on our western themed course.

Key Features:
My goal was to create a dusty look, but it had to be done completely with texturing, since Post Processing is not an option on Quest.

For the candle flames, I replaced the static meshes used in previous courses with animated, glowing flames. This required a mesh with specific vertex colors and UV layouts which would interact with an animated vertex offset shader, and required that the glow be in the model and texture/shader, since post processes are not an option on Quest. The shader also needed to allow for many flame meshes to be merged into a single mesh. Creating effects that don’t require unique transform information or pivot points (data not available in merged/batched geometry) is essential to achieving performance on Quest.

I then expanded on the candle flames to create the lanterns, which add a glass geometry that is merged with the flame mesh, sharing the same additive shader, and a larger, more complicated glow mesh to create large, soft glows that look dimension in VR, and dont require post processing.

For the level geometry and putting greens, the existing shaders were too expensive to maintain performance. So I created new, lightweight shaders to replace them.

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.