120 Days to Master Unity (Day 11)
Unity has a way to make games visually more interesting. There are a whole lot of visual effects that can be used to make a game go from dull to spectacular.
To access these effects, you have to get to Unity’s post processing package. This one of many Unity packages that can be added to any of your Unity projects. To get to the post processing package, go to the menu and click on Window and select package manager. This will open the package manager window.
When you first open the package manager window, you will see all of the packages that are already installed for your project and all of the packages that are available to be installed. In the upper right corner, you will see a search bar. You can type Post Processing in this search box which will take you to the Post Processing package. Once you type that in, just click on install in the bottom right corner and this will install the post processing package into your current project.
After the post processing package is installed, it can be used by creating an empty game object in your hierarchy and applying the post processing component to it.
After creating the Post Processing game object, make sure to check “is global” in the post processing component. This will allow the effects of the post processing component to apply to the entire project. Also make sure to create a new profile by clicking on new on the right of the profile box. This will create a new profile in the project view. The next thing that needs to be done is to create the effects that will add the effects to your project. This can be done by going to the Post Processing Volume game object just created earlier and clicking on Add effect… in your Post Processing Volume game component.
When you get back to this game component, a menu will appear. Select Unity and then the name of whatever effect you want to add. In my case, I selected the bloom effect. The Bloom effect allows for all of the materials in the entire project to be enhanced.
There are a couple more things that need to be done before post processing can be used. The first thing that needs to be done is to create a post processing layer. Go to the Post Processing game object in the heirarchy and click layer and then new, to create a new layer.
Name the new layer and then click on the Post Processing Game Object again. Once there, select the new layer you just created. This will allow the Post Processing game object to modify materials that are on this layer.
Next, go to the main camera and create a post processing layer component. Do this by clicking on Add Component and selecting the Post Processing Layer to add the component. Once this new camera component is added, find layer in this new component, click on it to get a drop down menu, and select the new Post Processing Layer you created. This will allow the camera to render the effects you create.
Once this is done, you can go back to the profile and modify any of the Bloom attributes. Generally, the Bloom effect makes all of the materials in the scene brighter depending on the setting.
Now we are able to change the Bloom effect in our game project!
