IMPERFECTER – Post Process Toolkit – Unreal Engine

IMPERFECTER – Post Process Toolkit – Unreal Engine

IMPERFECTER is a code plugin for Unreal Engine that extends the engine’s Post-Processing possibilities by providing a set of real-time modular Post-Process effects focused primarily on simulating various real-life camera imperfections.
Go-To plugin for every found-footage, bodycam, digicam, analog film style project. It’s ideal for adding that last bit of realism/believability to your projects.
The effects are made with Global Shaders that are inserted into the Unreal Engine’s rendering pipeline, which allows for achieving more complex and multi-pass Post-Process effects that normally wouldn’t be possible with regular Post-Process materials. On top of that, the effects’ architecture is standalone, meaning they’re independent from each other, allowing them to be modular, reordered freely, and even used multiple times in the same effect stack.

List of all available IMPERFECTER Effects:
Chromatic Aberration – Adds a chromatic aberration/lens fringe effect to the screen. Offers more customization compared to the one built in the engine.
Compression Artifacts – Simulates in real-time the low-bitrate artifacts caused by lossy compression algorithms via DCT quantization and deblocking filter.
Film Damage – Adds various animated, texture-based film damage imperfections to the screen like dust, dirt and scratches.
Halation – Simulates the spreading of light (bloom) in bright areas of the image that occurs in analog film.
Lens Dirt – Simulates blurry bokeh imperfections and light irregularities caused by dirt on a lens. Advanced dirt mask effect with independent threshold.
Lens Distortion – Applies distortion to the screen with a gradient or a polynomial distortion model. Allows for Bicubic filtering for best quality preservation.
Noise Grain – Adds procedurally-generated and/or texture-based film grain/digital noise to the screen.
Overlay – Adds a customizable gradient/texture to the screen with a desired blend mode.
Sharpen – Adds a sharpening effect to the screen via unsharp mask method with two different sharpening styles.
Soften – Adds a blur/softening effect to the screen. Fast to render gaussian blur implementation.
(More coming in the future)

IMPERFECTER introduces a custom In-Editor window tab to make working with the plugin easy and convenient. On top of that, the configuration of the effects can be saved and loaded via preset asset files.
Applying the effects happens via level actors called “Imperfecter Instances” as well as utilizing the Imperfecter Subsystem for changing the effect’s properties at runtime. The workflow is similar to working with Post Process Volumes. Simply add a new “Imperfecter Instance Actor” on the level and you’re ready to start adding the effects.
For detailed information about the plugin please read the Documentation

Sample scenes from the screenshots are not included.

Performance:
The plugin has been designed with performance in mind and it’s perfectly suitable for real-time rendering. The GPU cost is different for each effect based on the effect’s complexity and features used, here are the average costs of each effect measured on a Laptop RTX 2070 (1660ti Desktop equivalent) at 1920×1080 resolution:
Chromatic Aberration: 0.08ms
Compression Artifacts: 0.38ms – 0.60ms
Film Damage: 0.09ms
Halation: 0.23ms
Lens Dirt: 0.14ms – 0.21ms
Lens Distortion: 0.07ms – 0.11ms
Noise Grain: 0.13ms (up to 0.40ms with all possible layers enabled)
Overlay: 0.06ms
Sharpen: 0.12ms – 0.17ms
Soften: 0.10ms – 0.24ms
Code Modules:
Imperfecter (Runtime)
ImperfecterEditor (Editor)
Number of C++ Classes: 65
Number of Global Shaders: 18
Imperfecter requires Shader Model 5.0 or newer (Compute shaders support) on a target platform to function.
Supported Development & Target Build Platforms: Win64 (not yet tested on other platforms)
Supported Target RHIs: D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan
Supported Unreal Engine Versions: 5.4 – 5.6