Beautify Parameters

• 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).

• Super Sampling / Down-sampling: this slider shows up depending on the quality mode. In Best Quality mode, super sampling forces camera to render to a bigger target and then, down-scales it before applying Beautify effects. This results in a better quality image (you can also combine this to anti-alias – either MSAA or the integrated anti-alias that can be found in Shader Options section). In Best Performance mode, the down-sampling slider reduces the target size before applying Beautify effects (useful on slower devices).

• Preset: quickly choose a factory preset combination of values for the parameters below.

• Profile: assign or create a Beautify profile. A profile is a custom file that stores the current configuration. You can have multiple profiles 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.

• 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:

• • Min/Max depth: allows you to choose the depth range where sharpen will be applied. Decrease max depth to keep the skybox untouched. Increase min depth to cause an effect similar to depth of field

  • 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

  • Luminance Relaxation: sharpen is subtler on high contrasted areas. This parameter tunes this relaxation. Reduce this value to preserve thin edges or bright areas

  • Clamp: irrespective of sharpen intensity or above parameters, clamp controls the maximum effect applied over a single pixel

  • 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.

  • Min Depth: by default, dither is applied to the 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)

• 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. You can find a video tutorial on how to make your own LUTs here.
  

• 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 parameters add a final contrast + brightness adjustment to the image.

• 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 sensitivity) to adjust bloom effect. The 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 is like bloom but can be affected by 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 are a 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).

• Chromatic Aberration: simulates lens chromatic aberration by applying a color fringe effect to the scene around screen edges with custom intensity and optional smoothing (blur quality). The effect implements a variation of color dispersion based on their hues.

• 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 background and foreground looks blurred.

• • Auto-focus / Focus target / Focus distance: allows you to specify where the focus plane is. For auto-focus it’s recommended to reduce the focus speed as it will produce a more pleasant effect between changes.

  • Focus speed: the speed at which focus changes. 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.

  • Focal Length and Aperture: these two parameters are used to simulate the virtual camera. Focal Length is the distance between the lens and the image sensor. Aperture is referred to the effective aperture or diameter of the pupil through which the outside light enters.

  • Foreground Blur: enable to allow foreground objects to be blurred. Use offset to adjust the foreground blur distance.

  • Bokeh Composition: the integrated option is faster while the separated option produces stronger bokeh effects.

  • Down-sampling: reduces the screen buffer size to improve performance. Can produce some artifacts.

  • Sample count: refers 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.

  • Transparency Support: enabling this option will render a depth pass over transparent objects and consider their depth into the Circle of Confusion computation. Use only if you really need this.

  • Exclusion Layer: this option enables you to exclude certain objects in the scene from the Depth of Field effect. Useful to focus attention on specific areas or objects.

  • 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 or adaptation speeds.

• Purkinje: this effect simulates achromatic vision in the dark plus a spectrum shift to blue tones. You can customize the shift amount and the effect luminance threshold.

• Vignetting: darkens or tints with a custom color the border of the scene. The alpha component controls the intensity of the effect. This effect can be combined with Night Vision or others to add great depth and a specific atmosphere 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: choose between “Border” or “Cinematic Bands”. In the case of border, it 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. The cinematic bands style shows additional options to control the size and gradient of the bars.
  

• Outline: adds a white or colored border around objects 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 like night vision but just shift color hues to simulate thermal sensitivity. It also distorts the image to give the impression of temperature. This effect is also completed with noise and scan lines.

Some advanced options can be found inside the “Shader Options” section:

The first section “Shader Features” lists many of the shader options that can be enabled/disabled. Each feature uses a shader keyword to optimize the shader execution. Enabling or disabling an option will modify the shader source creating an optimized version of Beautify improving performance and saving build time and size.

The second section contains a few specific options. Each of these options also modify the shader source code:

• Orthographic Mode. Allows Beautify to work with an orthographic camera.

• Use Sharpen. Enables the sharpen algorithm. If disabled the sharpen logic is removed from the shader.

• Depth Based Effects. Disable to cancel request for camera depth buffer creation which can contribute to faster rendering, especially on mobile.

• Use Dithering. Same but for dithering effect.

• Dithering at the end. Dithering can be applied to the source image or after all Beautify effects have been applied. You decide.

• Color Tweaks. Enables/disables color correction options.

• Use Dynamic Range Eye Adaptation. Uses an improved algorithm to compute retina adaptation when light intensity changes. Should be left enabled. This option is left for compatibility reasons in case your project uses the old /basic method.

• Use Sun Depth-Based Occlusion. By default Beautify uses Ray-casting to determine if the Sun is occluded or not. When the Sun is not visible through the camera, the Sun Flares effect is diminished or removed. Enable this option to use a more precise way based on depth buffer instead of Ray-casting to determine if Sun is occluded.

• Use Alternate ACES operator. Switches to an alternate algorithm to compute ACES tone-mapping.

• Use Sobel Outline method. Uses a color-based algorithm to detect edges instead of depth changes. Can be useful for 2D games or to detect edges in the textures themselves.

• Use Procedural Sepia. Uses a mathematical method to compute Sepia effect instead of using a LUT-based method.

• Better Fast LUT. Improves LUT quality when using the Best Performance mode of Beautify.

• Anti-Aliasing. Enables a basic edge anti-alias in Beautify. A new option ‘AntiAlias’ is then shown in the ‘Image Enhancement’ section. This AA method is a basic anti-alias edge-based algorithm that can improve your image quality slightly if MSAA cannot be used and you prefer a basic but faster method than other Post-Processing based AA methods.

• Hard Light. Enables the hard light effect. Once enabled, additional options are shown under the Tone-mapping & Color Grading sections called hard light. This effect produces a more natural contrasted scene.

A profile is a special file that stores all the settings in the 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, …)
• Alongside the global Quality setting, they can be used to provide different performance options by using or not specific effect parameters (eg. depth of field down-sampling).

To create a new profile: click “Create” next to the Profile field in Beautify’s inspector. A new file will 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 profile file to the “Profile” field shown above. It can also be assigned using script:

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

For more examples using Beautify through scripting check out the relevant Scripting Support section.

To un-assign a profile: click on the profile field and hit the “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 in Beautify’s inspector, it won’t change the profile! To apply your changes (and update the profile), click “Apply”. Or click “Revert” to load the profile settings again and reset any changes you made.