Day 26 | How to use Post Processing in Unity

To further beautify your game, Unity provides a Post Processing stack. The Post Processing stack can add interesting and unique visual effects to give your game personality. This article will cover how to set up Post Processing in Unity.

Installing Post Processing

To install Post Processing, go to Window > Package Manager, and in the Package Manager window, ensure you are searching for packages in the Unity Registry. In the list, find the Post Processing package and click Install. The button changes to Remove if it’s already installed.

Setting Up Post Processing in Your Project

With Post Processing installed, we need to create a Post Processing volume, an object that will apply our Post Processing settings to the game scene. First, create an empty gameObject called PostProcessingVolume. Add a Post Processing Volume component to it. Finally, put the gameObject into a separate layer called Post Processing Layer.

In the Post Processing Volume component, we’ll create a new Post Processing profile and assign it to the volume component. The profile contains all the information about the effects that we want to apply to the scene.

As you use the Post Processing Stack and add more effects, you’ll likely use the Bloom and Color Grading effects most frequently. These 2 effects cover a large variety of visual aesthetics that people generally tend to use.

Applying Post Processing to the Camera

With the effects setup, we now want the camera to see all the new Post Processing effects. To do this, assign a Post Processing Layer component to the camera. By assigning the Main Camera as a trigger and the Post Processing Layer as the layer to blend, the camera now sees all the effects in the Post Processing Layer applied by our PostProcessingVolume gameObject.

After following these steps, you will have finished adding Post Processing to your game.