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Modern Post Processing

PlayCanvas offers modern post-processing workflows that provide visually advanced and performant implementations. The primary approach uses the CameraFrame class for HDR post-processing with built-in effects, but you can also create fully custom render passes for complete control.

Features​

The CameraFrame enables advanced rendering techniques including:

  • Bloom - HDR physically based bloom effect that simulates the natural glow of bright light sources
  • Volumetric Fog - Height fog and light shafts lit by directional, omni, and spot lights
  • SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) - Enhances depth perception by simulating ambient light occlusion
  • Depth of Field (DoF) - Mimics camera focus effects, blurring objects outside the focal plane
  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) - Reduces visual artifacts by smoothing jagged edges over time
  • Vignette - Blends the image edges towards a configurable color using vignette.color
  • Color Grading - Adjusts brightness, contrast, saturation, and color tint for stylistic effects
  • Color Enhance - Adjusts shadows, highlights, midtones, vibrance, and dehaze in HDR
  • Color LUT - Apply color lookup tables for advanced color transformations. See HDR Rendering > Color LUT for details.
  • Fringing - Chromatic aberration effect that simulates color channel separation
  • Tone Mapping - Controls how HDR colors are mapped to displayable range
  • Sharpness - Enhances image sharpness to counteract blurriness from TAA or upscaling

Setup and Usage​

For detailed information on setting up and using CameraFrame, see the HDR Rendering guide and the CameraFrame API documentation.

For Editor users, a ready-to-use script is available. See CameraFrame in the Editor for setup instructions.

Color Enhance​

colorEnhance provides selective adjustments in addition to the brightness, contrast, saturation, and tint controls in grading:

  • shadows and highlights brighten or darken those areas, with a range of -3 to 3 and a neutral value of 0.
  • midtones adjusts intermediate brightness while preserving shadows and highlights more strongly than an exposure change, with a range of -1 to 1.
  • vibrance boosts less-saturated colors more than already-saturated ones. Negative values desaturate; the range is -1 to 1.
  • dehaze increases clarity for positive values and adds haze for negative values, with a range of -1 to 1. This is a color adjustment; use volumetric fog for fog illuminated by scene lights.
cameraFrame.colorEnhance.enabled = true;
cameraFrame.colorEnhance.shadows = 0.5;
cameraFrame.colorEnhance.midtones = 0.1;
cameraFrame.colorEnhance.vibrance = 0.2;
cameraFrame.update();

All five adjustments default to 0, and the effect is disabled by default.

Vignette Color​

Use vignette.color to tint the edges instead of fading them to black:

cameraFrame.vignette.intensity = 0.4;
cameraFrame.vignette.color.set(0.1, 0.05, 0.2);
cameraFrame.update();

inner, outer, and curvature control the shape and falloff. Setting outer below inner reverses the effect, applying it towards the center.

Debug Views​

Set cameraFrame.debug to inspect an intermediate result: 'scene', 'ssao', 'bloom', 'vignette', 'dofcoc' (depth-of-field circle of confusion), 'dofblur', or 'depth'.

cameraFrame.debug = 'depth';
cameraFrame.update();

Debug views do not enable effects or generate additional textures. The depth view is black if the frame is not already producing scene depth; effect views require the corresponding effect to be enabled. Set debug to null and call update() to return to the composed image. In the Editor script, use Rendering > Debug and select None to restore normal output.

For Gaussian splats, see scene depth requirements when using fog or depth of field.

Examples​

  • HDR with Bloom and LUT - Demonstrates HDR bloom and color lookup table effects
HDR with Bloom and LUT
  • Post-Processing - Shows bloom, grading, Color Enhance, colored vignette, fringing, and TAA
Post-Processing
  • Ambient Occlusion - Demonstrates SSAO implementation
Ambient Occlusion
  • Depth of Field - Demonstrates depth of field effect
Depth of Field
  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing - Demonstrates TAA implementation
Temporal Anti-Aliasing
  • Volumetric Fog - Height fog illuminated by a directional light
Volumetric Fog
  • Volumetric Fog Local Lights - Omni and spot lights scattering in fog
Volumetric Fog Local Lights
  • Volumetric Fog Shafts - Shadowed spot light beams and light cookies
Volumetric Fog Shafts
  • LUT Grading - Crossfade between two color grades on a Gaussian splat scene
LUT Grading

Custom Post Processing​

Modern post-processing can be customized and extended in several ways. Choose the approach that best fits your needs:

Customizing the Compose Shader​

Extend the CameraFrame by adding effects to the final compose pass only. This is the simplest approach when you don't need additional render passes.

Best for: Simple screen-space effects, color adjustments, quick prototyping.

Extending FramePassCameraFrame Class​

Extend the CameraFrame by adding custom frame passes. This allows you to integrate additional rendering techniques while leveraging built-in effects.

Best for: Multi-pass effects, advanced integrations, processing intermediate results.

Custom Render Passes​

Build a complete custom post-processing stack without using CameraFrame. This gives you full control over the entire rendering pipeline.

Best for: Complete custom pipelines, specialized rendering, maximum flexibility.