Quick Start Guide

QuickStartGuide

User Manual:

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Page Count: 17

Introduction
Demo Scenes
Quick Start
Beautify parameters
Scripting support (C#)
FAQ (Frequent Asked Questions)
Support
Feedback & Review!

www.kronnect.com

 
 
 
Contents 
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 3 
Demo Scenes ............................................................................................................................... 4 
Quick Start ................................................................................................................................... 4 
Beautify parameters ..................................................................................................................... 5 
General Settings ................................................................................................................................................... 5 
Image Enhancements Options ............................................................................................................................. 5 
Color Grading Options .......................................................................................................................................... 6 
Lens & Lighting Effects ......................................................................................................................................... 7 
Artistic Choices ..................................................................................................................................................... 9 
Advanced Settings .............................................................................................................................................. 10 
Using Profiles ...................................................................................................................................................... 11 
Scripting support (C#) ................................................................................................................. 12 
FAQ (Frequent Asked Questions) ................................................................................................. 13 
Can Beautify work with other image effects? .................................................................................................... 13 
Skybox banding is not completely removed. What can I do? ............................................................................ 13 
What differences exist between the Best Performance and Quality settings? ................................................. 13 
When I launch a build, it takes lot of time to complete. What can I do? .......................................................... 14 
Can I exclude my UI from Beautify? ................................................................................................................... 14 
I get shader error on Playstation 4! ................................................................................................................... 15 
I get shader error on Xbox One! ......................................................................................................................... 15 
Can I make bloom affect only emissive materials? ............................................................................................ 15 
How to enable Orthographic Camera support? ................................................................................................. 15 
Is it possible to disable core effects like vibrance, dithering or sharpen? ......................................................... 15 
Bloom burns/saturates the lights, can I spread it or make it softer? ................................................................ 16 
I need to improve performance on mobile. Is it possible? ................................................................................ 16 
Support ..................................................................................................................................... 17 
Feedback & Review! ................................................................................................................... 17 
 

Introduction

Thanks for purchasing!

Beautify is a full-screen image processing effect that improves the image quality in real

time producing incredibly crisp and vivid scenes.

Beautify uses several algorithms in a single-pass resulting in a very fast image effect:

- Analyses local pixel contrast, enhancing visual features and producing sharp images.

- Reduces or completely removes banding in gradients, usually seen in sky boxes due

to color quantization.

- Adjusts pixel saturation, boosting pixel color without over saturating the image.

- Factory presets or global effect slider, which takes care of all effect details in one step.

In addition to this unique image enhancement technology, Beautify provides state

of the art filmic ACES tonemap operator and high quality extra effects which you can

combine just enabling them in the inspector. These are high quality effects which are

combined in the same render passes providing superior performance.

Beautify is very easy to use, just add the image effect to your camera, choose a preset

and that's all.

It works with forward and deferred rendering paths as well as linear and gamma color

spaces.

3 shader variants are included: a High Quality version that should be the preferred

choice, a Best Performance version which sacrifices some fidelity in favour of

performance and a Basic version which just comes with basic effects (sharpen, color

adjustment, dithering)..

Demo Scenes

A few demo scenes are included to quickly play with the different presets. Just open

and play with them to learn about Beautify possibilities.

Quick Start

1. Add the Beautify script to your main camera in your scene.

2. Choose one of the preset and that’s all!

You can of course customize any of its parameters to match your game mood and

requirements.

Beautify parameters

General Settings

- Quality: chooses the shader variant. The “Best performance” variant uses less

texture fetches and includes some extra optimizations which results in a faster

performance with less accuracy making it suitable for mobile devices (real

performance depends on device GPU power and the number of enabled

effects).

- Preset: quickly choose a factory combination of values for the parameters

below.

- Profile: assign or create a Beautify profile. A profile is a custom file that stores

current configuration. You can have multiple profile and assign them either in

Editor or at runtime. Jump to “Using Profiles” for more details.

- Compare Mode: shows a side by side comparison of Beautify effect.

Image Enhancements Options

- Sharpen: sharpen intensity. A higher value will produce a dramatic result but

can show some undesired artifacts with thin objects or whitish backgrounds.

Use the following extra settings to control those artifacts:

o Min/Max depth: allows you to choose the depth range where sharpen

will be applied. Decrease max depth to remain skybox untouched.

Increase min depth to cause an effect similar to depth of field.

o Max Depth: will compute depth difference around pixels to detect edges.

When the depth delta is greater than this value, sharpen will not occur.

This will protect thin objects like standalone wires or lines.

o Luminance Relaxation: sharpen is subtler on high contrasted areas. This

parameter tunes this relaxation. Reduce this value to preserve thin edges

or bright areas.

o Clamp: irrespective of sharpen intensity or above params, clamp controls

the maximum effect applied over a single pixel.

o Motion Sensibility: reduces sharpen effect while camera moves/rotates.

This option can reduce flickering and produce a cheap motion blur effect.

Set this value to 0 to disable this option.

- Dither: dither function shifts pixel RGB values according to a pseudo-random

pattern to reduce banding.

o Min Depth: by default, dither is applied to entire image. Use this

parameter to make dithering only occur beyond given depth (set this

value near 0.99 to make it only affect sky).

Color Grading Options

- Tonemapping: default is Linear which means no tonemap operator is applied.

Choose ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) to map HDR colors into LDR

space. Use only with HDR enabled on your camera.

- LUT (Look-up Texture) Transform: switches colors according to the provided

lookup texture. A sample LUT Sepia texture can be found inside

Beautify/Resources/Textures folder.

- Vibrance: controls the intensity of adaptative saturation. This algorithm

considers current saturation of each pixel, so low saturated pixels receive more

importance than high saturated pixels.

- Tint: multiplies scene pixels by a given color. Alpha controls the transparency of

the tint effect.

- Daltonize: similar to vibrance but mostly accentuate primary red, green and blue

colors to compensate protanomaly (red deficiency), deuteranomaly (green

deficiency) and tritanomaly (blue deficiency). This effect does not shift color hue

hence it won't help completely red, green or blue color blindness. The effect will

vary depending on each subject so this effect should be enabled on user

demand.

- Contrast & Brightness: these two paramters adds a final contrast + brightness

adjustment to the image.

Lens & Lighting Effects

them to create very nifty results!

- Bloom: produces fringes of light extending from the borders of bright areas,

contributing to the illusion of an extremely bright light overwhelming the

camera or eye capturing the scene. Use intensity and threshold (light sensibility)

to adjust bloom effect. Layer mask option allows you to specify which objects

are subject to bloom.

- Anamorphic Flares: also known as JJ Abrams flares, they add a sci-fi look to the

scene. This effect is only available for Best Quality settings. It’s similar to bloom

but also can be assigned a tint color (use alpha to blend between original and

tint color) and an orientation (horizontal or vertical).

- Sun Flares: beautiful, fast and procedural lens flares produced by the bright light

of the Sun. There’re lot of options to customize from sun disk size and intensity,

corona rays, ray diffraction and ghosts.

- Lens Dirt: adds dust and dirt effect to your camera when looking to a light

source. You can control the intensity and the brightness threshold (brightness

sensibility). If you want to use different dirt textures, just assign your own

texture into the Dirt Texture slot (several textures are provided in this asset

inside the Textures folder).

- Depth of Field with Bokeh: depth of field is the distance between the nearest

and the furthest objects giving a focused image. Enable this option to produce a

photography effect where the target object remains focused while the the

backgorund and foreground looks blurred.

o Autofocus / Focus target / Focus distance: allows you to specify where is

the focus plane. For autofocus it’s recommended to reduce the focus

speed as it will produce a more pleasant effect between changes.

o Focus speed: the speed between current focus and a focus change. For

example, if the target focus is moving a focus speed of 1 will update the

focus instantly whereas a lower value will make the focus more

progressive.

o Focal Length and Aperture: these two parameters are used to simulate

the virtual camera. Focal Lenth is the distance between the lens and the

image sensor. Aperture is referred to the effective apertura or diameter

of the pupil through which the outside light enters.

o Foreground Blur: enable to allow foreground objects to be blurred. Use

offset to adjust the foreground blur distance.

o Downsampling: reduces the screen buffer size to improve performance.

Can produce some artifacts.

o Sample count: referes to the maximum samples that will be gathered. The

algorithm is optimized to produce adequate results with a value of 4. A

lower value will be faster but the results will look incorrect. A greater

value will increase the quality of the blur, which can be appreciated when

using a higher focal length value.

o Transparency Support: enabling this option will render a depth pass over

transparent objects and take into account their depth into the Circle of

Confusion computation. Use only if you really need this.

o Exclusion Layer: this option enables you to exclude certain objects on the

scene from the Depth of Field effect. Useful to focus attention on specific

areas or objects.

o Exclusion Layer Bias: this is an offset value used in the exclusion layer

computation. Modify it if the excluded objects show DoF effect applied

over some areas.

- Eye Adaptation: simulates eye reaction to quick luminance changes in the

scene. You can customize the eye adaptation to light or to dark, either min/max

exposure changes and adaptation speeds.

- Purkinje: this effect simulates the achromatic vision in the dark plus a spectrum

shift to blue tones. You can customize the shift amount and the effect luminance

threshold.

Artistic Choices

This re optional mean combine many of them to create complex results!

- Vignetting: darkens or tints with a custom color the border of the scene. The

alpha component controls the effect intensity. This effect can be combined with

Night Vision or others to add great depth and special feeling to your scene.

Optionally assign a mask texture whose alpha component will be overlaid over

the image. You can find a sample grungeBorder texture inside

Resources/Textures folder.

Frame: adds a white or colored border to the screen. The alpha component

controls the size of the border. Optionally assign a frame texture. You can find a

sample grungeBorder texture inside Resources/Textures folder.

- Outline: adds a white or colored border around objetcts in the scene. The alpha

component controls the edge detection threshold.

- Night Vision: the night vision effect will allow you to see in complete dark. You

can customize the color (greenish by default) and the luminance using the alpha

component of the color picker. This effect is completed by noise and scan line

effect. Works great with vignetting enabled (set a black vignette with an alpha

of 32).

- Thermal Vision: this effect is similar to night vision but just shift color hues to

simulate termal sensitivity. It also distorts the image to give the impression of

temperature. This effect is also completed with noise and scan lines.

Advanced Settings

Some advanced options can be found inside the BeautifyAdvancedParams.cginc file

located in Resources/Shaders folder. This file contains some parameters that are

specific to custom scenarios and are shown in the “Advanced Option” section when

you click “Shader Options” button in Beautify’s inspector.

The file is self-described and it’s recommended that you don’t modify it directly but

instead use Beautify’s inspector tool to configure these shader defines.

Examples:

#define BEAUTIFY_ORTHO

Enables orthographic camera support. Only enable it if your camera is set to

orthographic projection.

#define BEAUTIFY_ENABLE_CORE_EFFECTS

By default, this option is enabled meaning that Sharpen, Brightness, Contrast and

Vibrance will be always used. If you’re just interested in one specific effect, like bloom

or depth of field and don’t want to use the core effects, comment out this line.

…

Using Profiles

A profile is a special file that stores all settings in Beautify inspector. You can have

multiple profiles in your project and assign them in Editor or at runtime.

Profiles are useful to:

- Store and load multiple configurations with ease.

- Duplicate existing settings and create variations.

- Apply custom styles to different scenes (eg. main menu, custom levels, …)

- Along the global Quality setting, they can be used to provide different

performance options by using or not specific effect parameters (eg. depth of

field downsampling).

To create a new profile: click “Create” next to Profile field in Beautify’s inspector. A

new file wil be created in the root of your project. This file contains a copy of all settings

of Beautify. Rename this file and move it to any folder you wish. The new profile will

automatically be assigned so any change you do to the profile will also affect Beautify.

To assign a profile: just drag & drop the profil file to the “Profile” field shown above.

It can also be assigned using script:

Beautify.instance.profile = Resources.Load<BeautifyProfile>(“path-to-profile”).

To unassign a profile: click on the profile field and hit “DELETE” key. To completely

remove the profile file, your delete the file from the project.

Once a profile is assigned: if you change any parameter on Beautify’s inspector, it

won’t change the profile! To apply your changes (to update the profile), click “Apply”.

Or click “Revert” to load the profile settings again and replace any change you did:

Scripting support (C#)

All properties of Beautify are exposed through Beautify component. A convenient way

to access Beautify’s properties attached to the main camera is using:

Beautify.instance.xxx = new value;

Where xxx is the name of the property. For example, Beautify.instance.sharpen = 6f

will change the power of sharpening to 6.

You can also trigger a blink effect calling: Beautify.instance.Blink method.

FAQ (Frequent Asked Questions)

Can Beautify work with other image effects?

Yes – however you need to experiment with image effects order. Beautify works better

after Antialias as it can remove the extra blur it can add (especially FXAA).

Skybox banding is not completely removed. What can I do?

Enable HDR in your camera to improve dithering effect and banding removal.

What differences exist between the Best Performance and Quality settings?

Beautify includes two main shader variants – one for desktop with all the goodies and

best algorithms and one for mobile.

The mobile version (Best Performance) has reduced quality across the shader. It’s a

little bit less accuarate with regards to the sharpen effect although unnoticieable.

Bloom and anamorphic flares is simplified in this mode.

Depth of Field effect has its own performance options, since this is a very complex

effect. Irrespective of desktop or mobile setting, ensure you set the appropiate

downsampling and sample count.

When I launch a build, it takes lot of time to complete. What can I do?

Beautify makes use of several shader keywords (using multi_compile directive) to

ensure only the useful code in shaders is executed. Multi_compile are directives that

are included in the shader files that make the compiler create different variants for

each shader, mixing different shader options in each variant. This way, when you

enable one option or another (eg. outline, night vision, …) Unity will pick up the

appropiate variant which has optimized code for that combination of features.

To reduce the build time, just open the Build Options section and disable the effects

you are not interested to include in your build. Disabled effects in this section won’t

be available in the shader (the shader itself is modified automatically by Beautify) so

Unity does not have to generate those variants hence reducing build time and resulting

binary size.

(Check out our Shader Control asset to manage other shader keywords in your project)

Can I exclude my UI from Beautify?

Yes, you need to edit Beautify.cs script and add [ImageEffectOpaque] just before the

method OnRenderImage, so it reads:

[ImageEffectOpaque]

void OnRenderImage(…)

I get shader error on Playstation 4!

Use the High Quality setting mode and remove BeautifyMobile.shader from

Beautify/Resources/Shaders folder.

I get shader error on Xbox One!

This error occur because the shader compiler provided with XBox DevKit only accepts

Windows file encondings. To solve this issue, create a new text file per each file found

in Beautify/Resources/Shaders folder and copy/past the contents, replacing the old

files with the new ones.

Can I make bloom affect only emissive materials?

Unity does not render emission separately from lighting when HDR is enabled so this

is not possible. But as emissive materials are also affected by lighting, the resulting

brightness value will always be higher that other non-emissive materials, so a

workaround is setting the threshold high enough so only emissive materials are

affected. You can also use the Layer Mask option to restrict bloom to emissive objects

How to enable Orthographic Camera support?

To enable support for orthographic camera, locate and edit the file

“BeautifyAdvancedParams.cginc” located inside the folder

“Beautify/Resources/Shaders”.

You will see a self-explanatory configuration file with a global shader define which is

commented out by default:

// Uncomment this one to support Orthographic Camera

//#define BEAUTIFY_ORTHO

Is it possible to disable core effects like vibrance, dithering or sharpen?

Yes, they are heavily optimized at the core but you can disable them if you just want

to use any other effect (for optimization purposes for example).

To disable the core effects, locate and edit the file “BeautifyAdvancedParams.cginc”

located inside the folder “Beautify/Resources/Shaders”.

// Comment out this one to disable sharpen, dithering, brightness, contrast and vibrance eff

ects

#define BEAUTIFY_ENABLE_CORE_EFFECTS

Bloom burns/saturates the lights, can I spread it or make it softer?

Yes, in addition to adjusting threshold and intensity, you can try the “Customize”

option (in Best Quality mode). This option will allow you to adjust the weight for each

one of the 6 hdr bloom layers. Reduce the weight for the first 3 layers. Also try the

“Boost” sliders for layers 5 and 6.

I need to improve performance on mobile. Is it possible?

Mobile devices vary in GPU power a lot. Old devices simply don’t have enough power

to maintain a decent frame rate while using image effects. Even a simple image effect

can reduce FPS a lot on older devices. Medium and high-end devices should be able to

run most of the effects fine – the result depends also on the number of effects and

options enabled.

Depth of Field is one of the most complex effects and here’s a video showing it running

at near 60 FPS along with bloom, sharpen and other core effects on iPhone 7+:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53i1jXwiKQQ

Consider the following configuration tips to provide a nice quality/performance

balance to your users:

1. Always provide a set of minimum options in your game menu so your users can

enable or disable visual effects according to their preferences. Some users with

powerful devices will want to enable all of the effects, while others will want to

reduce them or even disable them completely so the game can have a

minimum FPS.

2. Use “Best Performance” mode. This mode uses less texture fetches and render

passes.

3. Consider reducing some options under specific effects, like “bloom blur” or

“depth of field sample count”.

4. Edit BeautifyAdvancedParams.cginc file inside Resources/Beautify/Shaders

folder and take a look at the different options. You can perhaps disable

dithering to gain some GPU cycles.

5. The “Basic” mode provides a very basic set of options (sharpen, brightness,

contrast, vibrance) and does not use depth. This mode can be used as a

fallback for even better performance in some cases.

6. You game menu should contain the following quality options related to

Beautify: “No Effects”, “Basic” (the basic mode), “Normal”, “Great”, … each

one can include one or more effects according to your design/preferences.

Support

Please visit kronnect.com for questions, support and more info.

Feedback & Review!

We take a lot of effort to optimize and maintain Beautify. If you like it, please rate or

review it on the Asset Store, or send us an email telling your story/project/issues. We’ll

help asap!

Quick Start Guide