Post Processing via postprocessing

A correct render of good geometry still looks unfinished — flat, raw — without a finishing pass. A light, tasteful pass is part of a polished game's look, not an optional extra. It has three parts: ambient occlusion to ground objects in contact shadow, a subtle bloom so emissive and bright things glow, and tone mapping plus a gentle color grade to set mood. Add it once the scene already reads correctly, and keep it restrained — heavy bloom or crushed grading looks worse than none.

Post processing introduces the concepts of passes and effects to extend the common rendering workflow with fullscreen image-manipulation tools. The sections below cover the tasteful pass itself, the HDR and color-space setup it depends on, the two failure modes that break it (dark halos around transparent VFX, and a single bad fragment smeared into a full-screen white flash), and how to reach for the library's other effects.

The tasteful pass

The finish is a single restrained EffectPass over a correctly configured renderer and composer. Start with the renderer attributes, then wire the composer, then add a gentle grade if wanted.

The WebGLRenderer for a post processing workflow needs no on-screen depth or stencil buffer and benefits from preferring the discrete GPU. Antialiasing is left off here because it is handled inside the pipeline.

import { WebGLRenderer } from 'three'