Introduction

As you probably already know, Unreal combines many different pipelines in order to create whatever it is you are after—a video game, an app, an architectural walk-through. From animation to rendering, there are many different fields of study that we could be looking at. However much we would like to do so, the topics are just too wide to be tackled here. But even though we are not going to be looking at all of them, there is one important aspect that we need to pay attention to. It is one that directly affects the material and the rendering pipeline—we are talking, of course, about post-processing effects.

At their core, post-processing effects are a rendering pass that happens after our materials have been constructed but before the whole scene is outputted to the screen. They are like a layer that we can insert between what we have created and what the user experiences, so they are very powerful tools that enable us to modify and correct what we have previously done. Throughout the present chapter, we are going to be covering most of the available functionalities in the following recipes.

The properties we can tweak at that stage are anti-aliasing, color grading, depth of field, bloom, lens flares, vignetting, or screen space reflections. Those are just some of them, but something that they all have in common is that they affect the elements of the scene that are already placed in. Keeping that in mind will help us understand later on what is achievable through those methods and what is better done elsewhere.