What’s New in Beautify 3?

The actual definition of a good game is really simple. It’s the perfect combination of every single element composing that game. Some may shine more in a specific aspect, but in simple terms, good games show a great balance in all of them. One of these elements is post-processing, which basically are customizable filters that allow you to quickly enrich the visuals of your game and improve the user experience. 

What is Post Processing in Game Development?

Post-processing is a powerful tool that developers use to improve the appearance of game images, making the game look more stylized or realistic. Proper color and lighting are just as important to the success of a game as the game play becomes more immersive or fun. It makes the game more appealing and enticing for players, making them more likely to get immersed in the gameplay environment.

Post-processing involves applying special effects and filters to images that have been rendered in a game. This is done before the game images are sent to the monitor, allowing for more precise effects and fine-tuning the game’s graphics. It allows the developer to make a game look more realistic and enhance the mood of the scenes. For example, the Bloom effect can make a dark scene appear bright, and the White Balance effect can make a cloudy day look like the sun.

In addition to adjusting the colors, post-processing can also affect the motion of objects. By using the target alpha channel, they can extract a separate layer of information from the scene and apply it to the image. Both methods can produce good-looking scenes.

Beautify 3: The ultimate post-processing tool for Unity Developers

Our commitment to our users, along with their valuable feedback, helped us create version 3 of the most popular post-processing tool on the Unity Asset Store, Beautify. The new release not only improves many of the features but also adds more of them. Here are the main changes that Beautify 3 comes with:

• Support for Unity 2022: This year, Unity has announced the new version 2022, and for most of the tools available on the Asset Store, this new release implies that these assets need some changes to support this new Unity version. (It also keeps its support for 2020 and 2021 versions)
• New Anti-Aliasing Feature: Aliasing might be one of the most common problems we, as developers, can encounter while creating environments. When everything else is perfect, that annoying flicker on the edges of the 3D objects can break everything visually. One of the most requested features for Beautify was the Anti-Aliasing feature, which now comes included with Beautify 3.
• New Cinematic Bands Feature: What would be a western movie where two cowboys are ready to duel each other without the black cinematic bands effect on the screen? The truth is that this simple yet professional effect adds a lot to a cinematic scene, and well, it comes now with Beautify 3, so you can create the perfect cinematic animation for your projects.

These are the new feature additions we made for Beautify 3, but that’s not it! Here is a complete list of the rest of the implementations and improvements:

• Added “Edge Antialiasing” option
• Frame: added “Cinematic Bands” style
• Bloom: added “Bloom Spread” option
• Bloom: added “Quicker Blur” option
• Bloom: uncapped “Depth Attenuation” limit
• Anamorphic Flares: added “Quicker Blur” option
• Anamorphic Flares: uncapped “Depth Attenuation” limit
• Outline: added “Outline Depth Fade” option (requires “Outline Customize” to be enabled)
• Chromatic Aberration: added “Hue Shift” parameter
• Chromatic Aberration: added CHROMATIC_ABERRATION_ALT shader option (see documentation)
• Depth of field: improved foreground blur effect
• Depth of field: improved bokeh effect in Single Pass Instanced mode
• Added “Motion Restore Speed”. Improved accuracy of motion sensibility.
• Antialias: added “Depth Attenuation”. Reduces antialias effect on distance
• Added “Camera Layer Mask” to the render feature. This option let you specify which cameras can render Beautify effects
• Edge Antialias: added “Max Spread” option
• Volume inspector GUI performance optimizations
• Added “Downscale Mode” option
• [Fix] Fixed bloom & anamorphic flares not showing in secondary camera on VR setups
• [Fix] Fixes for Unity 2022.2 beta

Moreover, Beautify 3 is now the active and under maintenance version of Beautify. This means that more free updates will come to this version in the future.

Watch the official trailer and screenshots on Beautify 3 to understand how powerful this post-processing tool is for your project and why it has been chosen by the Asset Store community as the first go-to tool when it comes to environment enhancement in Unity.