Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Quixote Valley

With the 3rd course I worked on for Walkabout, they added a wind mechanic that would push your ball. This was just asking for a full graphical wind system, and lot of fx that would communicate the speed and direction of the wind to the player.

Key Features:
The wind system. It was treated as just another effect for a single course, so I developed the whole wind system in 1 week. Models that were to blow in the wind needed specific vertex colors and UV’s to properly interact with the vertex offset shader, so I also developed tools in Blender to quickly generate those. This system had to be able to work with many plants, merged/batched into a single mesh to be performant on Quest, so it couldn’t rely on mesh transform data or pivot points.

To illustrate the windy regions of the greens I came up with the idea of blowing flower petals across them, from all the flowers along the hillside. Petal particles and wind streaks flow through the air, as petals tumble across the green. And I modeled in the accumulation of static petals on the greens, along the edges of the wind regions, so it was clear to the player where their ball would be affected without needing to use any “gamey” indicators.

I also developed new river shader. Introducing stylized streaks that could interact with edge foam and smoothly transition into waterfalls. This also required a workflow in Blender to quickly generate a texture to act as a signed distance field emanating from where the water mesh intersected with its surrounding walls.

Fluffy clouds and fluffy sheep both use a realtime lit half-lambert, to give a softer appearance.

For the daytime scene, I created animated sun shader. Expanding on my simple sun shader, I used a simple trick that can allow for fully customizable animated light rays.

For night, I put stormy clouds in the distance. The extra challenge was to have their lightning flashes reflected in the ocean below. This required 2 cubemap reflections that stored a mask in each color channel (R,G,B, and A) for each lightning glow, which would respond to the animation of the cloud lightning.

The moon shader was also modified to be able to create moon shapes with a burst glow.

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.