How do the AAA studios do it?

Post Processing in Unity

Which hallway do you want to walk down?

If you are anything like I used to be you might to think there was some magic wizard employed at all game studios who made the games look as awesome as they do. Well we were half right, there is a wizard but they are not using magic powers. They are using post processing.

I remember the first time I saw a cell shaded game or the creep atmosphere of some survival horror game. Over the years I would fire up Unity and start making a game and something always felt ‘off’, my games lacked any resemblance to the games I was trying to mimic. I would spend ours tweaking dozens of lights trying to make a hallway creepy. Well I can stress no more thanks to post processing.

The post processing stack for Unity’s Built-in Renderer has the following effects we can work with.

• Ambient Occlusion
• Auto Exposure
• Bloom
• Chromatic Aberration
• Color Grading
• Depth of Field
• Grain
• Lens Distortion
• Motion Blur
• Screen Space Reflections
• Vignette

We won’t look at all of these today but we will look at two of the more popular options…