Unity Development — Post Processing Setup

Let me let you in on a little secret that is probably not such a secret anymore. Almost every image you have ever seen in your life has been modified in some way. Movies and pictures on the internet have all used Photoshop or After Effects or some other tool to make modifications. Who’s to say doesn’t happen in games too?

Unity has a special tool that will allow use to adjust our visuals, creating the perfect atmosphere. Today we are going to look at how to set it up. At the top of Unity, go to Window and Package Manager. You’ll come back here sometime for more advanced tools, so you should learn how to find it now.

Once that window is open, towards the top you will see a tab that lists the packages in your project. There are a number of built in packages for all projects. Click this and change it to ‘Unity Registry’. The list should become much larger. Make your way down to Post Processing and install the latest version.

Just a few more steps. Create an empty object in your scene to hold post processing effects. Under the components in the Inspector, add a Post Processing Layer.

In the volume, you’ll have to do two things. First, click “Is Global.” Then, hit ‘New’ for the Profile attribute. You’ll notice in your Project window, this will create a new Post Processing Profile under the specific scene.

We are very close now. None of this will matter, however, if the Main Camera can’t recognize the changes. Go to the Main Camera and add a Post Processing Layer component. You’ll most likely have to add a new layer that you can call Post Processing or anything else you’d like. Change the Post Processing object that you made earlier to be in that layer. You can do this in the top of the Inspector.

And there you have it! The Post Processing is all set up. Once you add effects in that volume, you’ll begin to notice the changes. We will discuss some of the specific effects available, but that is for another day.