Enola Devblog 3: Smoke and mirrors

One of the main themes in Enola is that the real world is desaturated, black and white. Every time Enola returns from the special world with a new understanding of a particular emotion that links to a colour. To demonstrate this to the player, post-processing will be used to show Enola's view of the world.

This is my first time exploring post-processing in Unreal 5 so I tried a few different experiments. Below is a screenshot of the start of messing around in post-processing where I managed to create a desaturated scene to start.

from this point, I needed to integrate the feature of certain objects having colour but maintaining the black-and-white aspect of the world. To achieve this I created a post-processing volume to give the objects a stencil that ignores the black and white and shows the original material instead. Below is a screenshot of the material created and how it masks the component depending on the rendering value.

In this material, an initial mask for the red component of the object is made. As the default rendering pass value is 0, this check is to make sure that it's above that. for example, if it were to set the rendering pass to 0 for the objects then they would remain black and white, however, if given the value of anything above 0 then colour will be shown. I have also implemented the feature for the main character to be able to turn on and off. We could potentially add a pulse mechanic so Enola can see the auras of objects within a certain distance as shown below.