How to use Post Processing in Unity
Being a person who has not shipped a game before, I actually had no idea regarding post processing. As we can guess from it’s name, post processing is a tool that we use at later stages with the goal of enhancing the visuals of our game.
An example is provided below, taken from Unity’s documentation that you can find here.
As you can observe, it makes a huge difference. So how do we use it?
To start using post processing objects, we first need to import the “post
processing package” to our project by simply Clicking Package Manager -> Unity -> Post Processing -> Install .
Just like a game manager or spawn manager, we will need a seperate game object for handling post processing duties in our game. Thus, we first create an empty game object with the name :“Post Processing Volume”. Now that we have the package installed, we can add the “Post Processing Volume” component to the game object we have just created. With this component, we are going to control all of the post processing effect in our game.
We can check “is global” in order to make sure that all of the objects in the scene is effected by the effects we made. However, it is possible to create different effects in different environments, such as applying a different effect to a inner part of a building and a different one for the open environment. In this game, we checked is global.
In order to create a new profile, we simply click “New” button and Unity creates and attaches the volume profile for us automatically.
Now, we can start adding the effects according to our desire.
For instance, you might select Bloom and you will notice that it will pop-up as a new component below.
However, if you try any of these effects you will realize that there will not be any changes in your game view.
In order to these effects to be observed, we need to tell the main camera to gather these effects. On this purpose, we need the “Post Process Layer” component to the main camera. You will notice that Layer is selected as “Nothing” by default. We need a special layer for post processing, thus we create a new layer as “Post Processing” and select it within the “Post Process Layer” component in the Main Camera inspector.
Since the main camera will now gather the “Post process layer”, we need to make sure that we have set the new “Post Processing Volume” game object’s layer as “Post Processing”.
Now we are set and ready to go. We can now add the effects according to our desire. Having limited experience, I will be updating my medium page as I gain more experience. Here’s a quick shot from the game without and with bloom effect.
