Arch Viz User Interface & Tools - FAQ

Frequently asked questions for the Arch Viz UI & Tools. Will be updated when necessary.

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Copy the DefaultInput.ini file from the example project to your project. This will assign the necessary controls. - Restart the editor.

The file is located in the 'MyProject/Config' folder.

Another reason is that you didn't set the correct Game Mode in the world properties. Make sure you followed all the steps explained in the getting started section.

Getting started

This problem also happens when a Sun and Sky Actor is in the scene. This actor is part of some templates. The sun is extremely bright (75.000 lux). The render to texture camera which renders the preview thumbs does not have exposure compensation. All images are extremely overexposed (white).

The work-around is either using custom preview images or to manually set the sun brightness to something like 10 lux. There won't be a big difference visually. Double click the directional light to make that change. The sun is by default movable. Set it to stationary if you want to bake lighting.

Try to avoid relying on exposure control to lit your scene correctly. Any value over 3.0 can cause problems with the preview renderer.

The 'Ultra Dynamic Sky' from the marketplace creates a great sky. Or you could use the sky setup from the ArchVizTools demo project.

Ultra Dynamic Sky

• Choose the Games category
• As Template choose a Blank. The UI uses its own character and game mode
• Choose the Project Settings
• You can set ray tracing here or change it later
• Choose the parent folder for your projects without the project subfolder
• Name your project. Unreal will create a main folder for this project.

Click on Create Project to finish.

Then follow the link below to get started in your new project.

Get started

Just keep in mind that ray-tracing is still in development and features like translucent objects reflected in mirrors don't always work. And you would need a RTX 20 series video card to get the performance you want.

Unreal Engine Documentation

Yes you can use this in VR. Works best in combination with a cheap XBOX controller instead of the VR controller.

Not all features are available in VR mode. The interface is displayed on a 3D model of a phone in front of the player instead of having the UI as an overlay on the screen.

Video playback and drone mode are disabled. Some features work a bit different. For example instead of choosing a material from a list the material choice will be instantly displayed on the object.

In the info map choose

• Menu Type: VR Style
• Input Controls: Controller with Target Move (default is XBox controller)

• Open the Project Settings
• Look for Input on the left list.
• Go through the Action or Axis Mappings and add the appropriate button or stick of your controller.

Example: The ToggleInterface action is currently bound to F or Controller B. Add the SteamTouch0 to the list. Now SteamTouch0 would also toggle the interface too. You would need to alter the help screen images plus some images in the VR widgets as well.

'Creating New Inputs (Action/Axis Mappings)' is explained at the end of the document linked below.

Unreal Engine Documentation

• Menu Type: use Compressed for a minimal UI
• Input Controls: depending on the device you have.

Touch only devices (tablet or phone) most likely may not work without changes to the input logic. You have to translate touch to a mouse click. There may also be a problem with the interface layer blocking any clicks into the game layer that would be needed to move or look around.

Unreal Engine Documentation

Best to remove all logic and replace it with the touch input you want. You can plug the result back into the existing nodes in the character. It's probably not a huge task.

I followed the YouTube tutorial on the right for my new UI3. First you need to determine if there is a swipe action to move the camera. The tutorial shows how to do that. If it isn't then you can use the result as a single touch or click on screen.

Using a menu should work fine. Unreal has a layered input system. Any widget will catch the input first. If there is no widget below the touch will be passed on to the blueprint controls in the character.

It's definitely solvable. There is plenty of help online about touch input if you need it.

It will disappear once you placed at least one of those locations into the scene as seen in the lower image.

There might be other similar error messages if you don't place any of the other actors. The UI will still function. To avoid these messages simply place the missing actors or fill in the required details into the InfoMap blueprint.

Fixed in latest update: Setting the Floorplan Material to masked instead of translucent fixed this issue. There is a 'Translucent Floorplan' flag for non raytracing projects.

Work around 1: Temporary disable the post processing volume where ray tracing is enabled. This will make the floor plan visible in the editor. You can align the floor plan and then reenable the post processing volume and ray tracing.

This problem only occurs in the editor viewport when ray tracing is enabled. The floor plan always shows up in run time when you play the scene. Make sure the texture is in the 'UI' domain and has the correct compression settings. The texture needs to be a black and white image of the floor plan where the background is white.

• The lights are mobile and they have to be if you want a moving sun in the sky. But mobile lighting isn't as good as static lighting. So you would need to set the lights to stationary for the directional sun and static for the skylight for good lighting.
• The ArchViz UI doesn't support a slider or anything to change the sun angle in game.
• The sun light has planetary scale values (75.000 lux) which doesn't work with the camera that produces the auto generated preview images for choices. You can set the values lower though (10 lux) but it still can cause problems with the previews.

Better to use the ultra dynamic sky from the marketplace.

Ultra Dynamic Sky

• Your project doesn't load or crashes when loading: Delete the config folder. This will restore the basic settings.
• Your viewport is in a weird mode: On the top left of your viewport click on [View]. On the very top of the menu that opens click on [Use Defaults].

Clean Up your project: If strange things happen, the performance is very low or other inexplicable problems occur you may want to migrate all your work into an empty new project.

• Create a new project as described on the top of this page. Then close it.
• Open the old project
• Select all levels you are using in the content browser and migrate them to the content folder of the new clean project.

This will migrate every asset in use to the clean project. Now you can check how the clean project runs and then start adding stuff to find out what was causing the issues. Or it might just be fine. Don't forget to copy the Defaultinput.ini file.

Create a new clean project

• Remove all reflection captures, light portals and rectangle lights.
• Enable Lumen, Raytracing, Extended Exposure Range, and disallow static lighting in the project settings. After restart build the lighting once to remove lightmaps.
• Disable the skylight and set the sun to movable and 50 lux
• Place a 'infinite extend' postprocess volume in each level with Lumen activated and quality set to 4.0. Everything else is default except Bloom intensity set to 0.1
• reduce the amount of interior lights and set the remaining ones to movable. You need to tweak the intensity.
• movies need to be in the Content/Movies folder.
• mirrors look bad so remove the planar reflections and keep the render to texture mirrors. You may need to refresh them.
• The walls shouldn't have complex interiors. Walls should be separated per side. It is relatively ok as is for a test.

In this case you need to decide if you want to enable virtual shadow maps.

• If yes, you need to enable SM6 shader model.
• If no, you need to disable Virtual Shadow Maps.

It should be ok to have Virtual Shadow Maps enabled. But if your project starts crashing for no apparent reason then try disabling it. Especially if you have a lot of large textures or a limited amount of GPU memory.

Also they might only work on Windows PCs.