Getting Started with Post Processing in Unity
What exactly is post processing? Some like to compare it to the tools you would find in PhotoShop or other photo/video editing tools. Adding image effects and filters as well as color correction into your game to name a few.
These are very powerful tools and in the right hands they can add a beautiful and artistic flair to your game.
It’s not mandatory but it is worth seeing what effects your can derive from it. Today we’ll go about installing the Post Processing Stack and getting an overview of some of its features.
We begin by going to the Window → Package Manager menu. There are several views for this such as what is in you project (“In project”).
We want to choose Unity Registry. Find the Post Processing Stack by Unity Technologies and hit install in the lower right corner of the window. It will take a few minutes to install into our project and once it does we can close the Package Manager window.
Next we want to create an empty Game Object in our hierarchy and name it “Post Process Volume”. In the inspector we can add a Component called “Post Process Volume”. We then want to enable the “Is Global” checkbox in the inspector. This will ensure that our Post Processing settings are carried globally across our game versus locally for different scenes of our game. For example if we wanted to add scenes of our game that take place in atmosphere vs in space (hmmm?). We would apply local settings to that scene/environment.
Under profile we want to click on “new” which will create a Post Processing Volume Profile in our Project’s Scene folder. Hang tight there are a few more steps we need to do before we can start playing with sliders. 😂
Next in the inspector we want to create a new layer called “Post Processing”.
We then hop into our “Main Camera” and add a component called “Post-process Layer”. We then choose Post Processing for the layer field.
Let’s pop back into our Post Process Volume → click “add Effect” and choose Bloom as well as Color Grading.
Where that was a lot of hoops to jump through. I’m glad I wrote it down so that I have a reference to come back to for upcoming games. Tomorrow we’ll dive into these effects and make our game scenes really pop.
Adios!
