Post Process

Tab: Post Process — Look & grade · Plugin: Cinematic Lab

Two halves. The top is a post-process volume editor with every section a cinematic pass needs. The bottom is Prism — 143 screen effects you stack, weight and order on a volume or a piloted camera.

The Post tab: volume tree, grouped PPV sections, and the Prism camera FX stack below.

Post-process volumes

+ PPV spawns a bounded volume, + Unbounded an unbounded one, Refresh re-scans. Volumes organise into folders like the camera and light trees.

Select a volume and ten sections become editable:

Section	What it exposes
Bloom	Intensity, Threshold
Exposure	Compensation, Auto Exposure (Histogram) with Min / Max EV100
Motion Blur	Amount
Lumen GI	Scene Lighting Quality, Scene Detail, Final Gather Quality
Lumen Reflections	Reflection Quality, Max Reflection Bounces
Path Tracer	Samples per Pixel, Max Bounces, Max Path Intensity, Emissive Materials, Reference DOF
Optical	Chromatic Aberration + CA Start Offset, Lens Flare Intensity + Bokeh Size, Vignette Intensity, Film Grain Intensity
Depth of Field	f-stop, Sensor Width (mm), Focal Distance (cm)
White Balance	Temp K, Tint
Color Grading	The four-axis grade below

The post-process volume tree with a volume selected.

The colour grade

Saturation, Contrast, Gamma and Gain, each on four axes — R / G / B / Master. Every axis defaults to 1.0 and ranges 0–2. That is sixteen controls, laid out as the panel says: “Each property has 4 axes — R / G / B / Master.”

PPV preset library

Save Selected stores a complete look — all sections, not just the grade — under a name; Apply puts it on any volume; Delete removes it. JSON-persisted across sessions.

Prism: Camera FX

Weighted post-process materials stacked on a target. Order is draw order, and the stack survives render — it is not a viewport-only preview.

First run

Prism’s effects are built on demand. Once per project, in the editor console:

EQLabs.Prism.GenerateLibrary

It creates 143 Material Functions, 143 post-process masters and 143 Material Instances under /CinematicLab/Prism/. It is idempotent and will not clobber tweaks you have made to an instance. If the effect browser looks empty, or a Look reports it could only be partly applied, this is the fix — and the panel says so in the message itself.

Picking a target

Stacks are per target:

• Post-process volume (primary). Select one in the tree above; the header reads Target volume: <name>. Every volume keeps its own stack.
• Piloted CineCamera (fallback). With no volume selected, Prism targets the camera you are piloting: Target camera: <name> (no volume selected). All cameras share one bucket, because “the piloted camera” is a role rather than a specific object.

Switching targets does not strip the previous one — each stays dressed.

Where stacks live, and the honest limit. Stacks are keyed by volume path in Saved/EQLabs/CinematicLab/CameraFXStack.json, so they outlive an unloaded region. Restoring them when the tool opens can only reach volumes loaded at that moment; the rest are dressed as they stream in. The panel states this rather than leaving you to discover it.

Building a stack

The effect browser searches all 143 by name or description and filters by family. + Add to Stack adds the selected effect’s Material Instance; double-clicking a row does the same. The counter reads <n> of <total> effects.

Each stacked row has:

Control	What it does
S (Solo)	Mute everything else without changing their enabled state. Click again to restore.
Up / Down	Move earlier (drawn first) or later (drawn last). Rows also drag to reorder.
Remove	Drop this effect
Weight	Per-effect blend

Parameters — <effect> exposes that material’s editable parameters, with Reset All Parameters to return the effect to its authored defaults. A material that exposes none says “This material exposes no editable parameters” rather than showing an empty box.

A Prism effect stack with several effects, their weights and the master.

Master intensity, and the keyable one

Master scales every effect’s weight at once — dial the whole look in or out without touching individual rows.

+ Keyable Master adds a Prism Camera FX Master component to the target actor. Its Master Intensity is keyable, so a Level Sequence that possesses the actor can fade the whole stack over a shot. It multiplies the Master slider, so adding it changes nothing until you key it — and the readout Sequencer master × <value> shows its live contribution, where 1.00 means it is contributing nothing.

The cost counter is honest about being an estimate

The pass counter reads <n> pass(es) with the note: “Active blendables. Each one is a full-screen pass at output resolution, so a deep stack is real GPU time — the count turns red past six.”

Per-effect GPU cost is labelled cheap / moderate / expensive, and the tooltip says exactly what that is: “(estimate — derived from the effect’s topology, not measured)”. A Look that carries expensive effects warns “contains N expensive effect(s) (estimate — from topology, not measured)”.

Nothing here claims to be a measurement. The pass count is real — it is a count. The cost tier is not, and says so.

Looks

A Look is a whole stack saved as one thing: effects, order, enabled state, weights, parameter overrides, and the master.

Action	Behaviour
Apply	Replace this target’s stack with the Look. Undoable.
Layer	Append the Look’s effects on top of what is already stacked, leaving the master intensity alone. Undoable.
Save Stack as Look	Save this target’s whole stack under a name
Delete	Remove a saved Look. Shipped Looks cannot be deleted — they are marked “shipped look (read-only)”.

Clear All clears this target’s stack only; other volumes keep theirs.

The Looks list, with shipped looks marked read-only.

Applying the Night Optics look from the Prism stack to the camera.

The same scene under a second post treatment.

Notes

• Order matters and is explicit. Draw order is the stack order; there is no hidden sort.
• Solo does not mutate. It mutes others without changing their enabled flags, so leaving solo on by accident costs you nothing permanent.
• A partial Look tells you what is missing. '<look>': N of M effects applied. Missing: … plus the command to fix it — rather than applying quietly and looking wrong.
• Full reference for the effect library ships with the plugin as Docs/Prism_CameraFX_UserGuide.md.