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Scene Look (Post-processing)

Grade the finished frame. A scene look is a stack of screen-space effects — ambient occlusion, colour grading, bloom, vignette, film grain, pixelation — applied over the whole viewport after the scene is drawn.

The look is part of the scene. It replicates to everyone in the session the moment you change it, it is saved with the file, and it undoes like any other edit. Nobody has to switch anything on to see what you made.

Opening it

Configure Scene ▸ Post-processing — or right-click the viewport and choose View ▸ Post-processing…, which opens the panel straight at that section.

Building a look

Press + Add effect and pick one from its family:

Family Effects
Ambient occlusion Ambient occlusion
Colour grading Tone mapping, Hue / saturation, Brightness / contrast, LUT
Stylize Dot screen
Camera FX Bloom, Vignette, Film grain, Chromatic aberration, Pixelation, Scanlines
Anti-aliasing SMAA

Each row has a grip to drag it up or down, a checkbox to switch it off without losing its settings, and a ✕ to remove it. Click a row's name to open its parameters.

The order matters. The stack runs top to bottom over the frame, so grading placed before a vignette darkens differently than grading placed after it. Drag to rearrange, or use the ↑ ↓ buttons.

What the "passes" line means

Under the enable checkbox you will see something like:

Effects: 4, passes: 2 (2 merged into a shared pass)

Most effects are combined into a single fullscreen shader, so eight of them usually cost far less than eight times one. Ambient occlusion is the exception — it needs a pass of its own, and it splits the run wherever you place it. That line is there so you can see the cost of what you are building; if you care about performance, keep the AO entry at one end of the stack rather than the middle.

Ambient occlusion

Soft contact shadows where surfaces meet. Its parameters had no controls at all before this release:

  • Radius — how far a surface looks for things that occlude it, in world units.
  • Intensity — how dark the occlusion gets.
  • Falloff — how quickly the effect fades with distance.
  • Quality and Half resolution — both default to Auto, which follows each viewer's own shadow-quality setting, so everyone keeps their own performance trade-off. Pin them when the look matters more than the frame rate.

If your scene sets its own ambient occlusion, the personal Shaded + AO button in View switches off and says so — the scene's setting is used instead. Two AO passes would double every contact shadow and cost twice as much.

Colour grading with a LUT

A LUT (lookup table) is the standard way to move a grade between tools. Put a .cube file — or a LUT strip image — in the Explorer, then pick it in the LUT effect's LUT file row.

The file is shared with your peers automatically. Anyone who does not have it asks for it, so people who join later get the grade too, and it travels inside a saved .tpscene.

Smooth interpolation (tetrahedral sampling) is slower but avoids banding on small LUTs.

Tone mapping

Tone mapping decides how bright values are compressed into what your screen can show. While a Tone mapping effect is in the stack it takes over from the renderer's own curve, so the image is never mapped twice — pick the curve you want (AgX, ACES Filmic, Neutral, Reinhard, Cineon, Uncharted 2) and set its white point and middle grey.

Seeing it, or not

The look renders for everybody. What is local is your right to switch it off:

  • View ▸ Overrides — this device has a Scene look (post-processing) checkbox. Turn it off if your machine struggles, or if an effect is uncomfortable to look at. Your peers still see the scene as its author made it.
  • Wireframe skips post-processing entirely — it is a diagnostic view.
  • Turning an effect off in the stack, or unticking Scene look enabled, changes it for everyone — that is scene data, not a personal setting.

A look for one camera

A look does not have to belong to the whole scene. Any camera can carry its own, so switching cameras switches the grade — a hero camera with a heavy cinematic look, a security-monitor camera that is deliberately grey and grainy.

In Post-processing, the Look for row picks which look you are editing: The scene (everyone), or any camera in the scene. Pick a camera and you get a fresh, empty list — build it exactly the same way.

A camera look only shows while someone is looking through that camera. So after you add effects to one, the viewport does not change until you look through it — select the camera and press Preview, or use a Set Active Camera node.

Add, or replace

The Combine row decides how a camera look meets the scene look:
Add to the scene look The scene look runs first, then this camera's. The usual choice: the house look plus a grade for this shot.
Replace the scene look Only this camera's look runs. For a camera that is deliberately not the house look.

Effects still merge across the join, so a scene grade plus a camera grade is usually still one fullscreen pass.

Camera looks are scene data like everything else here: they replicate, they save with the file, and they undo.

Switching looks from a node graph

The Set Look node (Game group) switches a look when something happens — a key press, a trigger, a game state.

  • camera — whose look. Leave it empty to target the scene look. Wire an Object Selector, or pick from the list on the card.
  • look — on or off.
  • look through it too — on by default, and usually what you want: the node points your view at that camera as well, which is what makes its look visible. Turn it off when you only want to arm or disarm a look without moving anyone.

So Key Press R → Set Look (camera A) and Key Press U → Set Look (camera B) gives you two grades on two keys.

The switch is per viewer and temporary: it never edits the saved look, so turning one off in a game does not change what anyone has authored. Each peer acts on the same replicated trigger, so nobody's graph moves anybody else's view.

If you turn look through it too off and nothing is looking through that camera, the node has nothing visible to do — the card says so while you build, and it tells you once if you fire it anyway.

Limits worth knowing

  • Post-processing does not run in VR. The effects are skipped in a headset; objects still look the same, and materials made with the Shader Graph are unaffected.
  • The camera preview inset (PiP) shows the plain image, without the look.
  • Sprites, billboarded avatar photo cards and particles do not write depth, so effects that read depth do not affect them. A strong stylize effect makes that more visible than ambient occlusion ever did.
  • A GLTF export does not carry the look — glTF has nowhere to put screen-space effects. The app tells you when you export. Save a Scene (.tpscene) to keep it.
  • On some mobile GPUs fullscreen effects are mis-rendered by the driver: the viewport can freeze on a stale frame while you move. If that happens, switch the scene look off in View ▸ Overrides.
  • Very old browser builds have a shader bug with fullscreen effects; the app detects them, skips the look and explains once.

Effects that come from a newer version

If someone using a newer build adds an effect this one does not know, it is shown in the list as unsupported and left completely alone — it is still saved, still shared, and still there for people whose version does understand it. Nothing you do to the rest of the stack deletes it.