ARFX Options Menu

The Setup section of the options menu pertains to all relevant settings for the ARFX Camera and its particular tracking Component.  The Setup section is what you’ll see first when opening the options menu. From here you can setup your physical screen’s size, setup your tracking information, and more. If it has something to do with our ARFX Camera, it will be found here.

• Camera Tracking: Toggle camera tracking on and off as needed for your scene.

• Screen Size (cm, WxH): Allows you to define the physical dimensions of the screen in centimeters.

• Distance to Hide Objects Near Camera: Distance at which the camera will clip objects too close to the screen. Also known as Near Clip Distance.

• Camera Rotation Speed: Adjust the speed of the camera’s pan and tilt movements.

• Camera Movement Speed: Set the speed at which the camera moves around in the scene.

• Bookmark Transition Speed: Define the speed at which the camera will transition between different bookmarks.

• Always Skip Bookmark Transition: If enabled, the camera will skip transitions and move directly to the next bookmark’s location.

• Manual Focus: Toggle manual focus. Note that it is usually recommended to manage focus through the physical camera rather than software.

• Focal Distance: Set the focal distance for manual focus. Again, physical camera adjustments are recommended over software-based focusing.

This section allows you to select and configure your tracking method. If you chose SteamVR as the tracking method during installation, you will see SteamVR settings here.  More on Free-D can be found in ARwall's FreeD Tracking Component Section of the Knowledge Base

If you choose Free-D, you’ll see the Free-D setup options. You can also change your tracking method by clicking the “Select Tracking Method” button.

Start FreeD - Starts/Stops the Free-D receiver. This button should change to say Stop Free-D when setup correctly. If it does not, then either the IP address doesn’t match one found on this machine or the port is already in use.

IP Address - The IP address of this computer on the same network as the device providing FreeD tracking data.

UDP Port - Port number to connect to the address above.

This List of Trackers - Only shows when you have successfully connected to a tracking provider. You can set any tracker found to be your Hero or Calibration tracker. If there is only one tracker, then leave it set to Hero and enable Use Hero Tracker as Calibrator

This menu is only available when using the SteamVR tracking component.

More on SteamVR can be found in Track SteamVR of the Knowledge Base.  

• Patch SteamVR - Changes SteamVR's configuration to disable the requirement for an HMD (Head Mounted Display). If it is already disabled, the button will disable itself and the indicator text will change to how it is shown above.

• Hero Tracker Serial - Serial number for the hero tracker. Pressing Auto will assign the first connected tracker found (if any).

• Calibration Tracker Serial - Serial number for the calibration tracker. Pressing Auto will assign the second connected tracker found (if any).

• Tracking Delay - Delays tracking by this number of frames

• Use Tracking Velocity Clamps - Toggles velocity thresholds on/off.

• Bypass Clamps for Calibration - If enabled, the calibration tracker will always use unfiltered positions

• Threshold Sample Size - Number of samples we take to determine velocity and angular velocity

• Velocity Threshold - Speed at which we start tracking.        

• Angular Velocity Threshold - Rotational speed at which we start tracking.  

• User Hero Tracker as Calibrator: Allows the hero tracker to act as the calibrator tracker.

• Lock Tracking Rotations: Zero all rotations and locks it so that they are never used.

• Disable Tracking While Calibrating: Disables tracking of the camera while the calibration mode is enabled

• Flip X-Axis: If enabled, this flops the X-axis position data.

• Flip Y-Axis:  If enabled, this flops the Y-axis position data.

• Flip Z-Axis: If enabled, this flops the Z-axis position data.

• XYZ to ZYX Coordinates: Swaps Forward/Back movement to be Up/Down

• XYZ to XZY Coordinates: Flips Right/Left movement with Up/Down.

• Current Time: Set the time of day for the scene. The time is displayed in a 24-hour format, allowing you to precisely control the time within the virtual environment.

• Animate Time of the Day: If enabled, this feature will allow the sun and moon to move across the sky based on the time set, creating a realistic day-night cycle.

• Day Length: If “Animate Time of the Day” is enabled, this setting controls how long a day lasts in real-time, influencing how quickly the sun and moon transition.

• Night Length: Similarly, this controls the length of the night in minutes when “Animate Time of the Day” is enabled, determining how long the moon stays visible.

• Weather: Choose and set the current weather conditions in the scene, such as clear skies, rain, or storms.

• Cloud Render Quality: Adjust the quality of cloud rendering in the scene. Higher-quality clouds may look more realistic but could be more resource-intensive, depending on your hardware.

• Cloud Height: Adjust the vertical height at which clouds appear in the sky to suit the environment you are simulating.

• Height Fog: Control the density and appearance of fog at certain heights within the scene.

• Volumetric Fog: Enables the use of thicker physical volumetric fog. It can be very resource intensive depending on hardware and settings

• Volumetric Fog Distance: This enables the use of thicker physical volumetric fog. Depending on hardware and settings, it can be very resource intensive.

The Color Lab allows for a wide variety of color controls!

The Color Lab is a list of every color related control that could be typically found in a PostProcessVolume. The settings here generally affect any PPV that has been set to infinite in a scene (prioritizing any PPV with “global” in its name). In ARwall’s built individual scenes, this PPV is a second one that ;blends your changes made atop whatever color settings have already been placed by our designers.

We will not be going over every setting here, but we will highlight two of the most important points.

• Global Blend Weight: This option affects how heavily the changes made in this menu affect the PPVs already placed within the scene. By default, this is set to 0.5 or 50% blend weight. At 100%, you are completely overriding the original PPV with your own changes.

• Global Gain:

• Global Temperature: Temperature in Kelvin

• Global Tint

• Global Contrast

• Highlights Gain

• Midtone Gain

• Shadow Gain

• Temperature Type: Select the type of temperature calculation.

• Temperature: Temperature in Kelvin

• Tint

• Blend Weight: Controls how much the settings of this menu affects the scene’s default color settings

• Blue Correction:

• Expand Gamut:

• Tone Curve Amount

• Toggle Calibration Menu: Tab (or Gamepad X)

• Calibrate Screen: C (or Gamepad B)

• Toggle Debug Information: Z (or Select)

• Toggle Focus Method: F

• Focal Distance Up: Num 3

• Focal Distance Down: Num 1

• Toggle Focus Debug Plane: G (or Gamepad Y)

• Move Camera Forward

• Move Camera Back

• Move Camera Left

• Move Camera Right

• Move Camera Up

• Move Camera Down

• Rotate Camera Left

• Rotate Camera Right

• Rotate Camera Up

• Rotate Camera Down

• Turn Camera 90° Right

• Turn Camera 90° Left

• Toggle Rotation method: Switch between rotating at the screen to rotating at the camera’s position

• Toggle Move Method: Switch between free XYZ movement and locked XY movement

• Toggle Snap Controls: Toggles snap controls on/off

• Toggle Camera Pitch and Roll: Set camera rotation and roll to 0

• Dpad Up Toggles/reset rotation, snap up/forward: Toggle Rotation, (Held) Reset Pitch/Roll, snap vertically up, (Held) Snap Forward

• Dpad Down Toggles move method/focus input, snap down/back: Toggle Move Method, (Held) Toggle Focus Input, Snap Vertically Down, (Held) Snap Backward

• Dpad Left Creates bookmark, snap/focus left: Create Bookmark, Snap Horizontally Left, Focal Distance Back (-1)

• Dpad Right Navigates to next bookmark, snap/focus right: Next Bookmark, Snap Horizontally Right, Focal Distance(+1)

• Key Up Adjusts pitch/focus, snap up: Pitch Up, Focus Up, Snap Up, (Held) Snap Forward

• Create Bookmark: Creates a bookmark only while in play in the editor. (Does not work in standalone)

• Next Bookmark: Travels to next bookmark

• Previous Bookmark: Travels to previous bookmark

• Action 1: Activates action 1 in scene (if any)

• Action 2: Activates action 2 in scene (if any)

• Action 3: Activates action 3 in scene (if any)

• Action 4: Activates action 3 in scene (if any)

• Action 5: Activates action 5 in scene (if any)

• Load Map 1: Loads the map 1 (if any)

• Load Map 2: Loads the map 2 (if any)

• Load Map 3: Loads the map 3 (if any)

• Load Map 4: Loads the map 4 (if any)

• Load Map 5: Loads the map 5 (if any)

• Load Map 6: Loads the map 6 (if any)

• Load Map 7: Loads the map 7 (if any)

• Load Map 8: Loads the map 8 (if any)

• Load Map 9: Loads the map 9 (if any)

Quality Preset: Adjust the quality of all graphics & textures settings.

This is a growing list of diverse options related solely to optimizing Unreal Engines’ graphical fidelity.

The Graphics menu are settings that have a direct effect on the graphical fidelity of your scene. It is also the one place to go in that will influence how well your scene will run on your particular machine. By default, ARwall’s built scenes will run as high a fidelity as possible, regardless of hardware. By changing your settings here, you can see in real-time the effect each setting will have both on your frame rate and the fidelity of your scene.

Notes for those in Unreal Editor

It is highly recommended that you use the editor’s Scalability options instead of this menu as the editor will simply override and lock down the settings that the option menu relies on. The greyed-out options in the will also indicate where you can go to do this.

To access the editor’s Scalability Options go to Settings (top right of the editor) > Engine Scalability Options

Settings To Change First for Performance

The following settings have the most impact on performance. You will have to compromise on graphical fidelity no matter what you choose.

Temporal Resolution Scale - This uses Unreal’s TSR to allow you to up or down sample the internal resolution of the rendered scene. To gain a great amount of performance, try down-sampling the image to 60-70%. If your output resolution is 4K or higher, you can go down even further to 40-50% (effectively rendering at 2K or 1440p and outputting to your final 4k and beyond). The lower you go, the softer the image will look. Requires Anti-Aliasing set to Temporal Super-Resolution

Post-Process Quality - This adjusts the quality of post process effects like that of overall lighting, color grading, and more. Lowering this to High or Medium will yield higher frame rates at usually little to no visual impact.

Shadow Quality - Adjusts the quality of calculated shadows, especially when using Unreal’s Lumen. Setting this to Medium will usually net a lot of performance if your scene is dependent on many real-time shadows. The cost to fidelity is also dependent on your scene.

Lumen Global Illumination - We list it here as it can increase performance but significantly decrease fidelity in one option. Depending on your scene, this could either drastically help you or cause the scene backdrop to suffer immensely.

Lumen Reflection Setting - In particular, Reflection Method, can greatly improve performance depending on if your scene has many reflections that are not the focus of your scene. Switching to Screen Space Reflections (SSR) will increase your performance at the cost of reflections that are not true to its surrounding environment. There is also the problem that SSR cannot reflect anything that is off screen, resulting in a fade away of reflections depending on angle.

• Temporal Resolution Scale: Adjust the sharpness of the game graphics. When it’s too low, the items could show in a blurry.

• Display Mode: Select the display mode

• Resolution: Select the display resolution

• Gamma: Adjust gamma calibration

• V-Sync: Vertical synchronization prevents screen tearing

• Max FPS: Select max FPS

• HDR: Enables output of high Dynamic Range(HDR) to take advantage of higher contrast and wider color gamut. This requires that you enable HDR in windows.

• Display Nits: Enable HDR to edit this setting.

A Note on HDR (High Dynamic Range)

Enabling this option requires a restart of the application and that the scene runs in exclusive fullscreen mode. Also Note that most designers do not work with HDR in mind, so elevated black levels may be an issue.

• Anisotropic Filtering: Reducing blur and preserving detail at extreme viewing angles.

• Texture Quality: Adjust Quality of the textures

• Texture Pool Size: Allocates the specified amount of VRAM for texture streaming. This can fix blurry textured in specific scenes. Do not exceed the amount physically available on your GPU

• Post-Processing Quality: Adjust the quality of post-processing effects.

• Anti-Aliasing Method: Choose the method of Anti-Aliasing(AA) to use or turn it off completely. FXAA is a fast but blurry. TAA has slightly better visuals for litter impact. MSAA gives better lines but is very expensive at higher resolution. TSR is an upsampling technique that is suprisingly perfomant and clean.

• Anti-Aliasing Quality: Adjust the quality of AA, smooths the objects’ graphics. It is recommended to turn this on.

• Shadow Quality: Adjust the quality of shadows for characters and objects.

• Effects Quality: Adjust the quality of various effects like reflections and material fidelity. (Can take a moment)

• Detail Quality: Adjust the minimum detail level for actor to render

• Foliage Quality: Adjust the quality of Foliage

• View Distance Quality:  Adjust the visible distance. objects will be hidden based on their distance to the player.

• Motion Blur Quality: Adjust the blur quality on fast-moving objects

• Lumen Global Illumination: Select whether to use a lumen for ray-traced global illumination or to fall to baked lighting(if any). Has a moderate GPU and CPU cost and greatly affects visual quality.

• Scene Lighting Quality: Larger scales cause Lumen Scene to be calculated with higher fidelity, which can be visible in reflections, but with a higher GPU cost.

• Scene Lighting Detail: Controls the size of instances that can be represented in Lumen Scene. Larger values ensure small objects are represented, but increase GPU cost.

• Scene Lighting View Distance: Sets the maximum view distance of the scene that Lumen maintains for ray tracing against. Larger values increase the effective range of sky shadowing and global illumination but increase GPU cost.

• Final Gather Quality: Increases the quality of lumen global illumination and reduces noise being rendered, but increases the GPU cost of rendering it.

• Max Trace Distance: Controls the maximum distance that Lumen should trace while solving lighting. Values that are too small cause lighting to leak into large areas, such as caves. Large values increase the GPU cost to render the scene.

• Capture Resolution Scale: Scalar that controls the resolution of the shadow and highlight resolutions. Smaller values save GPU memory , at a cost in quality.

• Reflection Method: Select whether to use Lumen Ray Traced Reflections, Screen Space Reflections (SSR), or None at all. Lumen has a heavy GPU load depending on the amount in the scene. SSR is performant, but is inaccurate and only renders what’s on screen.

• Reflection Quality: Increases the quality of Lument Reflections on surfaces, and reduces noise being rendered, but increases the GPU COST of rendering them.

• Translucency Reflections: Determines how to handle mirror reflections infront of translucent surfaces. Other layers. Increases GPU cost when set High.

• Reflection Bounces: Sets the maximum number of recursive reflection bounces. 1 means a single reflection ray (no secondary reflections in mirrors). Only supported by GPUs with hardware ray tracing. Has a significant GPU cost with each additional bounce.

The User Interface section has a list of settings that affect the Options menu as a whole. With this you can scale the menu to better fit your needs, make the menu completely transparent, or even disable the menu’s frame rate widget.

• Options Menu Scale: Change user interface scale

• Background Opacity: Sets the opacity of the tinting used over the rendered scene for the options menu.

• Background Black Opacity: Sets the opacity of the black background that can be applied over the rendered scene below the options menu.

• Background Blur: Affects the strength of the blur used over the rendered scene below the options menu.

• Options Menu FPS: Toggle for this menu’s FPS and frame time display at the top right.

This page allows you to manage the history of changes you have made within your ARFX environment. It provides options for viewing Current Changes and tracking the Change History. Additionally, you can clear the history of modifications made or delete all settings to revert the environment back to its default state.

The history section houses a list of changes made throughout your use of the options menu. It is also your place to reset everything that has been saved by the ARFX Camera. Do know that any changes made here cannot be reverted.

Important

Though this menu captures every save you’ve made, the menu is only set to revert changes to the Color Lab. The reason for this is that Setup, Controls, and Graphics all have settings that peculiar to the operation of your scene. We do not want to revert these important settings."

Here, you can save all the changes you have made in your settings.