The Importance of Post Processing

May 1st, 2026

Background

I wanted to show a little bit of my process here in color grading / correcting the lighting.

Lighting and color grading are one of the most important aspects of a game that most people don't really consider, but one that will just make a game feel off or like it doesn't fit the vibe.

In this case, I just really wasn't vibing with the coloring, something felt off.

For the last video I had something like this:

Which felt a little too drab and bluish for me, there just wasn't a lot of interesting lighting going on for me.

As I was experimenting, I quickly moved towards a more punchy yellowish grading to make the greens pop more, which will then make the reds (in a bloody heavy game) explode right in your face (hell yeah).

The real difficulty there is to find the balance where it doesn't get too desaturated or unnatural, since we are going for a more realistic game, but enough to get that desired color pop effect.

I ended up getting somewhere around here:

And I felt like it was "good enough", but I came back after lunch and saw how dark and it was still "drab" feeling.

I then spent hours of my time trying in vain to bump up the exposure/brightness without making it feel washed out like many early prototypes do. I was chasing my own tail in circles flipping between too bright, not enough contrast/depth of shading, then too dark, and losing my color palette entirely.

Finally, I came up with a somewhat hacky solution of adding small, blended point lights to keep the level of contrast, while also not having the darkest regions too dark to where it becomes invisible in the shadowy regions.

For my own sanity, that is good enough for now (now nearing midnight here), but I can't help but feel the shadows still aren't sticking right and the foliage especially is way off from what I want.

The real trouble is trying to find a good balance of photorealism and something that my potato of a machine (and the average gamer still on the RTX 3000 series) can run. I really want Zornhau to be as accessible as possible so many people can enjoy the grit of fighting with dozens of others in chivalrous combat!

I think it is looking pretty solid so far and the development build (unoptimized) is getting a consistent 70 FPS on my system.

Closing Remarks

Next up, I'm going to build out the vegetation/foliage system a bit more or find a better solution altogether (ideally with better real time shading). Maybe upgrading the bump maps on the stone brick textures shown here, the normals are looking a little funky for my liking which makes the shadows look unnaturally strong.

I'm still not entirely satisfied with the lighting yet still, it looks a little washed out and the yellows not as bright as I'd like. I'll probably have to get creative since I am using Unity's URP (HDRP is supposedly going to be deprecated soon and URP used for everything) and the post-processing effects are pretty restrictive compared to the stack that Adobe offers for video effects, for example.

Overall, I think it's looking a lot better though! Let me know what you guys think.

Check out the step by step process and scene views below.

– Frost