This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Unreal Engine allows developers to create industry-leading visuals for a wide array of real-time experiences. Compared to other platforms, mixed reality provides some new visual challenges and opportunities. MRTK-Unreal’s Graphics Tools empowers developers to make the most of these visual opportunities.


 


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Graphics Tools is an Unreal Engine plugin with code, blueprints, and example assets created to help improve the visual fidelity of mixed reality applications while staying within performance budgets.


 


When talking about performance in mixed reality, questions normally arise around “what is visually possible on HoloLens 2?” The device is a self-contained computer that sits on your head and renders to a stereo display. The mobile graphics processing unit (GPU) on the HoloLens 2 supports a wide gamut of features, but it is important to play to the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of the GPU.


 


On HoloLens 2 the target framerate is 60 frames per second (or 16.66 milliseconds for your application to preset a new frame). Applications which do not hit this frame rate can result in deteriorated user experiences such as worsened hologram stabilization, hand tracking, and world tracking.


 


One common bottleneck in “what is possible” is how to achieve efficient real-time lighting techniques in mixed reality. Let’s outline how Graphics Tools solves this problem below.


 


Lighting, simplified


By default, Unreal uses the mobile lighting rendering path for HoloLens 2. This lighting path is well suited for mobile phones and handhelds, but is often too costly for HoloLens 2. To ensure developers have access to a lighting path that is performant, Graphics Tools incudes a simplified physically based lighting system accessible via the MF_GTDefaultLit material function. This lighting model restricts the number of dynamic lights and enforces some graphics features are disabled.


 


If you are familiar with Unreal’s default lighting material setup, the inputs to the MF_GTDefaultLit function should look very similar. For example, changing the values to the Metallic and Roughness inputs can provide convincing looking metal surfaces as seen below.


 


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If you are interested in learning more about the lighting model it is best to take a peek at the HLSL shader code that lives with the Graphics Tools plugin and read the documentation.


 


What is slow?


More often than not, you are going to get to a point in your application development where your app isn’t hitting your target framerate and you need to figure out why. This is where profiling comes into the picture. Unreal Engine has tons of great resources for profiling (one of our favorites is Unreal Insights which works on HoloLens 2 as of Unreal Engine 4.26).


 


Most of the aforementioned tools require connecting your HoloLens 2 to a development PC, which is great for fine grained profiling, but often you just need a high-level overview of performance within the headset. Graphics Tools provides the GTVisualProfiler actor which gives real-time information about the current frame times represented in milliseconds, draw call count, and visible polygon count in a stereo friendly view. A snapshot of the GTVisualProfiler is demonstrated below.


 


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In the above image a developer can, at a glance, see their application is limited by GPU time. It is highly recommended to always show a framerate visual while running & debugging an application to continuously track performance.


 


Performance can be an ambiguous and constantly changing challenge for mixed reality developers, and the spectrum of knowledge to rationalize performance is vast. There are some general recommendations for understanding how to approach performance for an application in the Graphics Tools profiling documentation.


 


Peering inside holograms


Many developers ask for tools to “peer inside” a hologram. When reviewing complex assemblies, it’s helpful to cut away portions of a model to see parts which are normally occluded. To solve this scenario Graphics Tools has a feature called clipping primitives.


 


A clipping primitive represents an analytic shape that passes its state and transformation data into a material. Material functions can then take this primitive data and perform calculations, such as returning the signed distance from the shape’s surface. Included with Graphics Tools are the following clipping primitive shapes.


 


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Note, the clipping cone can be adjusted to also represent a capped cylinder. Clipping primitives can be configured to clip pixels within their shape or outside of their shape. Some other use cases for clipping primitives are as a 3D stencil test, or as a mechanism to get the distance from an analytical surface. Being able to calculate the distance from a surface within a shader allows one to do effects like the orange border glow in the above image.


 


To learn more about clipping primitives please see the associated documentation.


 


Making things “look good”


The world is our oyster when it comes to creating visual effects for HoloLens 2. Unreal Engine has a powerful material editor that allows people without shader experience to create and explore. To bootstrap developers, Graphics Tools contains a few out-of-the-box effects.


 


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Effects include:



  • Proximity based lighting (docs)

  • Procedural mesh texturing & lighting (docs)

  • Simulated iridescence, rim lighting, + more (docs)


To see all of these effects, plus everything described above in action, Graphics Tools includes an example plugin which can be cloned directly from GitHub or downloaded from the releases page. If you have a HoloLens 2, you can also download and sideload a pre-built version of the example app from the releases page.


 


Questions?


We are always eager to hear more from the community for ways to improve the toolkit. Please feel free to share your experiences and suggestions below, or on our newly created GitHub discussions page.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.