Unity: Using post processing to raise your visuals game

Adding some extra visual effects can really add polish to your game’s visuals. Here’s how a few of them work.

In the previous article we set up post processing for our project. We can now start adding effects. The first one we will add is Bloom. On our PostProcessingVolume, click ‘Add effect…’ and add Bloom.

Bloom enhances light-sources in the scene to give them a flare of brightness and intensity. There are various settings here but we’ll stick to just three for now. Firstly, Intensity adjusts the strength of the bloom.

Threshold clips the Bloom so that it effects only those parts of the scene above a certain brightness or gamma.

Third, you can change the colour of the Bloom effect. This can create some cool lighting effects.

The next effect we will add is Color Grading. This works in much the same way as colour grading in photo and video editing applications. First, we must alter our build settings to accommodate HDR grading.

Go to File > Build Settings then click ‘Player Settings’. Under ‘Player’ find the ‘Color Space’ setting and change this to Linear.

There are many things you can adjust in Color Grading and it could take dozens of articles to go through it all. A quick way to add some colour to our scene is to alter the Temperature (left is cooler, more blue, right is warmer and more yellow/orange) and the Tint (left is more green, right is more pink).

We can also adjust the over all brightness of the scene with Exposure. Above is how the settings will look when turned on.

The final effect we will add is a Vignette which replicates older lens effects but essentially allows you to darken or brighten the corners which can create a more appealing scene.

Adding a Vignette has just slightly darkened our edges and corners and brought the focus more to the middle of the screen.

There are many more effects and settings for post processing. I suggest you play about with them and find the ones that enhance your game’s visuals!