Graphics, they're an important feature of
any game they are the visuals that immerse players into new worlds, tell
stories and even convey mechanics A major component graphics are the
post-processing effects and with Unity's provided post-processing stack it has
never been easier to apply such effects to your own game in a free and effective
way, with that being said every indie developer working with Unity should be
aware of these features and should utilize them to enhance their game. In
this tutorial I'll cover how to set up the order version and the current 2.0
version of the post-processing stack I'll also explain the various effects we
have at our disposal and we will finally end using what we have learned to
enhance the visuals of our own scene If you would like to skip to a specific section
in the video I have left links in the description below Alright so let's install the older
version of the post-processing stack to do that simply navigate to the asset
store up here if this tab doesn't appear for you you can simply go to window,
general, asset store or control 9 for a shortcut but I've already got the tab here so
I'm just going to click that and go into the search bar and just type "post
pro" that should be enough and there we go it's the second one here you'll notice
if it's right one if it has that logo there and Unity Technologies underneath, so,
click on that Alright so here is the page if you haven't downloaded before this
button here will say 'download' simply click that once that is done it will
change to import like I've got here simply click on that, so, what this is
doing is getting all the assets ready Click import again and now put
them into your project alright so mines now installed you can
see I have the folder called post processing now we'll actually almost
done so simply go back to your scene and click on your main camera and go to add
component down here and type "post pro" and we're just going to click on the
'post processing behavior' now you can see here there's asking for a profile the
profile is actually what has all the parameters that we get to adjust and
apply the effects so to create a profile go into your project menu here right
click, go to create and then post processing profile I'm just going to
call mine "test" for now, you can see that's it here now go back to your main
camera and simply drag it in so there we go we've set up the entire
system, very easy, to start applying effects click on your profile once more
you will see on the side here we have all the effects just click on which ones you
want and then click again to expand to get extra options To install the version 2.0 of the post processing stack we are going to need to navigate to window
package manager, all and then scroll down until you see post-processing so here it is
here and at the top here just click install right so the files have now
installed into the project if we go to packages down here we can see there are
all the files let's go back out and set it up for our scene so click on your
camera and go to add component and just simply type in "post pro" and we're going
to add the post process layer now expand that now the layer needs to be a unique
identifier when you install the package post-processing should be added to your
layers but if that does not appear you can simply go up to the top here click on
layers, edit layers and then type in your own layer, alright, so that's all we have
to do in that little script part there for the layout of the main camera let's
select post-processing so now we need to create an empty game object to do that
navigate to GameObject, Create Empty I'm just gonna call this "Post Vol"
and click on add component and this time we're going to add the 'post process
volume' so there we go this is asking for a profile like the
previous version and to do that it is identical so simply go into your project
right click, create, post process profile yet again I'm just going to call my "test"
go back to your volume and drag in the profile now this would also require a
collider you could do that simply with a box and set it to trigger as would
mean that whenever our camera comes into contact with this trigger the effects
will apply, however, if you want this to be global and apply regardless of the
cameras position navigate back into the volume and click 'is global' all right so
to apply effects click on our profile once more and simply go to add effect you can
add what you want I'm just going to add some color grading expand that and then
pick the values that you would like now almost forgot but we also need to change
the layout of this object to post-processing as well if we did not do
this it would not work. So if I go into the game view, go into our profile and
start playing around with some values you can see we are updating our scene HDR HDR, which stands for 'high dynamic range' is not a post processing stack feature rather it is found in the camera
settings, enabling HDR will heighten the dynamic range of visuals which is the
contrast between bright and dark areas allowing for greater detail and clarity Anti-Aliasing Provides a smoother appearance to graphics by removing that awful pixelated look, by blending the color of an edge with the color of
pixels around however keep in mind as the quality increases so does the
reduction in performance, Unity supports multiple anti-aliasing methods as
follows: FXAA (fast approximation anti-aliasing), TAA (temporal
anti-aliasing) and SMAA (sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing) FXAA is the cheapest technique and is
recommended for mobile games or slower desktops and consoles. TAA is an
advanced technique which uses a history of frames to create a buffer to smooth
edges it is more taxing than FXAA and is not recommended for mobile games when
enabling this method you will receive multiple adjustable values which
includes Jitter Spread: the diameter inside which is
jitter samples are spread, basically the smaller values result in crisp output
while large values result in more stable but blurred output. Blending stationary:
controls the percentage of history samples for objects of minimal movement
larger values result in smoother output Blending motion: controls the percentage
of history samples for active motion larger values will result in smoother
output. Sharpness: in high frequency regions TAA may induce a loss in detail
Sharpness alleviates such issues SMAA, works similarly to FXAA, however, provides
more accurate and cleaner results as such it is more intensive than FXAA and
is recommended for desktops and consoles For additional information about various
anti-aliasing methods I have linked a video by Science Studio below Ambient Occulsion Approximates how much ambient lighting can hit a point on a surface,
in other words allows you to achieve more realistic lighting so you almost
always want this enabled now unity Now Unity provides two modes of ambient occlusion
including Scaleable Ambient Obscurance and Multiple Scale Volumetric Obscurance.
SAO has a lower quality but provides greater control in providing adjustable
radius and quality settings MSVO is high quality and is faster on desktop
and consoles and my personal recommendation as I find that SAO tends
to cause more issues such as conflicts with nature shaders Auto Exposure or Eye
Adaptation, simulates how a real I adjust to different light levels applying this
effect can add greater depth to your scenes while also ensuring that areas
can never be too dark or too bright Now people often get confused with the
exposure settings of the feature so I'll do my best to explain each component.
Filtering: is when the bright and dark areas of frame are filtered to avoid
extremely bright or dark pixels Minimum EV: is the minimum luminance or darkness to consider for auto exposure to occur the lower this value the
greater darker areas will be lit up when viewed Maximum EV: is the maximum
luminance or brightness to consider for auto exposure to occur the greater
this value the darker bright areas will become when viewed And finally Exposure
Compensation, this is kind of like the middle value used to provide the base
exposure of the entire scene Bloom recreates the fringing of light
extending from the borders of bright areas seen in real world cameras which
contributes to the illusion of an extremely bright light, the main areas to
consider are intensity which enhances the strength of the bloom effect and a
threshold which provides a level of brightness an area must surpass for the
bloom effect to apply, dirt textures can also be applied to create the illusion
of dust and smudges on the camera lens Chromatic Aberration, creates defects in
color along the boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of an image
similar to a vignette it can be used to draw attention to the center of the
screen Colour Grading, is essentially applying filters to your visuals at first color grading may seem complicated however most of the settings are
generally self-explanatory for the most part you will only be adjusting values
in the white balance, tone and channel mixer. For the channel mixer it is important to keep your adjustments subtle if you're aiming for realism I will go over the
components in more detail in the practical section of the video Depth of Field applies a blur to areas out-of-focus and is a great way to draw
emphasis, focus distance: refers to the distance from the camera which is in
focus also known as the focal point, aperture
or F-stop in photography refers to how open a camera lens is to let light in,
for Unity the lower the value the greater the blur.
Focal length in photography refers to the length between the lens and the film, a greater value will result in more blurring Motion blur, simulates the
blurring of an image when objects are moving faster than the camera's shutter
speed which is the duration of time in which the sensor inside the camera is
exposed to light the smaller this value the greater the blur. Sample count is the
number of sample points considered when determining the blur, higher values will
result in greater quality however it will decrease performance Screen Space Reflections, uses screen data to apply additional reflections to your scene
commonly used for subtle reflections such as puddles or wet surfaces this
effect is expensive and will decrease performance therefore this effect
shouldn't be used for mobile applications Maximum March Distance refers to the maximum distance that will be considered for applying reflections.
Distance Fade refers to the distance before fading occurs on the actual
reflection. Vignette will fade reflections that are more closer to the
screen edges and finally Vignette, which is the
darkening or reduction of saturation towards the edge of the screen and is a
great way to draw emphasis Alright so welcome to the practical section of the
video I've started off by making this quick scene it didn't take too long and
all the assets I have used are also free if you'd like to download them I have
left links in the description below now my plan for this scene is to create a
very strong filtered effect that way I can best show off the power or the
post-processing stack now keep in mind I will usually apply such effects during
the construction of the scene however for the sake of this tutorial I'm doing
so now so to get started I'm just gonna go up to my main camera and apply some
anti-aliasing I'm gonna select SMAA and put it on high quality now next step is
to go to window > rendering > lighting settings this brings up the lighting
panel I'm gonna drag over here and what I want to do is add a fog so I just
scroll down and select a fog now it's very subtle but I'm gonna add a slight
pink effect you can barely see it actually I'm going to set it to maybe 2 there we go that seems like a nice value if I toggle it
on and off you can see the effect especially here in the front so next
step is to create the profile so I'm gonna go to create > post posting profile, I have
two because I have both version installed but I know that the second one is the
version 2.0 now I'm just gonna call mine "tutorial" and then drag it on to my post
processing volume, whoops, need to go into the inspector there we go so now we can
start applying effects what I like to start off with is ambient occlusion so
let's select that and tick all the values now intensity what I tend to do
is I don't have a set value to go to rather I tend to just play around with it
until I find something I like you can especially see the effects here
and here and it really adds depth to the scene so
I reckon what will be stronger than that maybe 1.5 see how that looks
looks pretty good so now let's go up to here and increase the thickness of the
shadow So I reckon increasing it makes it look even
better that's probably a bit too strong just lets go near two, yeah around there so thats go 2.12, there we go. Seems fine if I turn off ambient only you can see it
becomes a lot stronger from here it actually looks alright
especially with the grass and everything you can see in this view it
looks awful so I'm just gonna keep it on it's more precise and I think looks a
little bit more realistic this way so next effect is some bloom so this will
just brighten up the scene and make it a little bit more inviting same again
just tick all those values and we will go up to intensity check on one, that didn't make a
difference that's because our threshold seems to be a little too high so let's
just decrease this by half and then add one you can see it just brightens up the sky, I want it a
little bit brighter how about 2, yeah I'm quite happy with that so let's leave it on that. Now soft
key this is kind of the spread of the bloom effect it's actually quite subtle to
see here but I'm just gonna leave it at 350 if I turn it on and off you can see
it makes a drastic effect even all of these if I turn it off already
it really transforms the scene alright, so next step is... let's add some
emphasis through some depth of field now I've already measured up the focal point
which is going to be this arch which becomes a circle in the reflection
which is really nice and that's at 50 now if I decrease the aperture here you'll
see the blurring effect gets stronger you can see that that stays in focus because that's
where the focal point is now that's probably too strong so I reckon, yeah about
3 seems fine for me Now increasing the focal length will blur
again but with this one you can see there's quite a sharp difference and that
doesn't look too nice so I'm just gonna decrease one to 100 maybe
115, 117, yeah I like that So you can see here its blurs kind of the front water
here, the bushes here and a tiny bit at the back and it just draws your attention to
the circle which is what I want now that's essentially all the setup for
quite a realistic scene that's probably all I would do but I want to show off
the color grading which can really transform the scene now I'm gonna make a
pink filter effect and you could do that in many ways I could use the
trackballs down here and just drag it up to pink and you can see already it gives
it a slight pink hue but I'm gonna actually do that with the tint if I drag
a tint back and forth you can see that adjusts the colors this is very easy way
to apply a filter effect I'm gonna go 50 that seems quite nice
actually and I want to brighten up the scene so I
can do that with the exposure I just select 1, oh, okay that's a bit too bright we'll
halve that yep that seems a lot better so also what
I like to adjust his saturation and contrast so contrast makes the black and
whites more defined as you can see max now I'm just gonna put it on 1 maybe 1.5,
1.4 yeah that seems fine for me and saturation makes it various colors pop
more and become more vibrant if I really bump it up you can see how it affects
the same it's kind of like the juicy effect in Halo if you remember that back in the day
so I'm gonna chuck it 1 maybe I'll try that first
okay that's really subtle I kind of like that if I stop putting it up too much it
looks a bit too cartoony for me I'm gonna leave it there now the scene looks
fine to me how it is I'll probably just leave it like that the other effects do
very subtle work actually we could add screen space reflection it's not gonna
make too big of a difference because we don't really have any extremely
reflective properties or materials in our scene but it will still help add
like it'll just make better lighting and make the scene look a lot more realistic
so let's put it on overkill because it's a very small scene let's just toggle it on
and off oh yeah you can see it's darkening up
areas and even the background here you can see it effects up here now I reckon it looks a
lot better with the screen space reflection so we'll leave that in and I almost
forgot but we need a vignette, this will really emphasize
that circle piece and just draw your attention to it
you can see I've centered this arch perfectly in the middle and this water
line here is also half of the screen so that way so that's just composition
techniques and it just draws your eye directly there, I'm considering making
another tutorial talking about the artist techniques that go into designing so
composition the golden ratio all that kind of stuff it's really interesting it can
really make your scenes look so much better but I'm going off on a tangent, let's do this
vignetting so my favorite setting in vignetting is the smoothing, it just smooths it out, most people kind of leave it and tend to just
use the intensity and if I bring it up like that it creates really sharp
edges I don't like that effect I prefer it when it's smooths out so you can see
there's a lot more subtle and it just draws your your attention there if it wasn't smooth I
find it too distracting looking at thse sharp lines but that's just me so I'm
gonna put the intensity quite low actually cuz I'm gonna smooth it out a
lot so we'll try it out with 0.5 at first and we'll smooth this, I reckon 1 is fine, turn it on and off, makes a big difference alright, so that's
essentially it I would call that done now and if we toggle on and off all the
effects you can see just how much power the post processing has it really transforms
the scene even this looks a lot more 3d as if you can enter it but this just looks
flat, looks boring looks dry almost there's no vibrant
colors. So, that's it we're all done we have transfer on the scene I think it
looks so much better now you probably notice that I don't have a set way of
applying post-processing I simply play around with the values until I find
something that I like and I encourage that same behavior for your own scenes
so I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did make sure to like and subscribe and
hopefully you have learned something new and gained a useful insight to how I go
about my own scenes for that being said I'll see you in the next one :D
