Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Gardens of babylon

This was the 2nd course I worked on, but it was released after Quixote Valley, which is why there is no wind on the plants, since I hadn’t created the wind system yet. It was the night course in Babylon where I really got to have fun. To contrast the prominent water fountain in the daytime course, I populated the night version with cauldrons of fire.

Key Features:
The surrounding ocean is so prominent, I wanted it to have a more convincing reflection than a typical cubemap could provide. I created a shader that could use a single cubemap and manipulate it so 2 landmarks would always stay in the correct alignment. I pick the 2 points that would be most obvious if the reflection slipped.
For the fountain at the center of the day course, I had to develop a particle effect for water streams that wasn’t too heavy and still held up when viewed in VR. Flat shaded, freeform stretched particles with an animated water texture on them worked well. The flat shading makes it harder to distinguish that they are flat cards. And the freeform stretching allows them to maintain volume from various angles.

In the night course, I developed a new fire effect. Expanding upon the kind of geometry I used for candle flames, with glow planes and specific usage of vertex colors and UV’s. These angular, stylized meshes were emitted as particles, using a shader that interacts with the particle system’s attributes.

Due to the number of flame particles, I had to develop a LOD system for particle effects that would reduce their emission and increase the particle size, based on distance from the player. Scaling up the particles while reducing their count allows for the presence of the fire to remain, so I wouldn’t have to cull entire particle systems to maintain performance.

I wanted the distant background to remain very graphic so I opted to use simple gradation in the sky around the temple, with thin geometric clouds. And speckled the buildings with simple, animated torch flames.

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.