1. Select Effects in the Toolbox.

2. Click the desired effect and drag it into the 3D View.

3. Edit the name of the effect.

4. If adding a particle effect, attach and/or place it using the transform controls.

The Color Grading extension allows you to alter and enhance the colors of your scene. It can only be added at the Scene level.

Color Grading modifies the colors represented on the screen by applying a tone mapping function (i.e., bringing high dynamic range back to low dynamic range for the monitor to render the pixels) and a color correction transformation.

In the Properties panel, configure the following fields:

• Color LUT: Color correction is implemented through a 256x16 image/color lookup table (LUT). After tone mapping is applied (see next bullet point), the LDR color from the scene is replaced by its related color from the LUT.
  
  To add multiple presets LUTs (including sepia and warm LUTs), right-click the Color Grading extension in the Explorer panel and select Insert Color Grading LUTs. Otherwise, another way to use this feature is to take a screenshot of a rendered image and modify it through graphics editing software, as well as modifying a neutral LUT in the same way, in order to create a mapping between the original colors and the modified ones. Add the LUT to your scene as a texture then link it to this field.
  
  Consider the following neutral LUT to use when applying filters:

  Open

  

  
  The following are some examples of modified LUTs:

  Open

  

   

  Open

  

   

  Open

  

  
  Thee

• Tone Mapping: Used to map pixel colors, which are in high dynamic range (HDR) in Vortex, to the low dynamic range (LDR) used by monitors. HDR rendering allows Vortex to have a bigger light to dark ratio, making it possible to have strong lights and darker zones in the same scene.
  This extension defaults to a custom function, but the following tone mapping presets are available, each with their own adjustable settings:

  • Engine (default)

  • Hable

  • Linear

  • Dawson

  • Reinhard

• Exposure: Value used to control the scene's color exposure, measured in time (seconds).

• Exposure Bias: Value meant to overexpose or underexpose the colors, to better simulate the exposure effect of the human eye.

Example

Consider the following images:

Placing a decal allows you to add a material on top of an object in your scene, mechanism or Graphics Gallery. After adding a decal, a box appears with an arrow inside. The decal box acts like a projector. Place the box over the object upon which you want the decal to appear, and orient the arrow to point in the desired direction using the rotation tools. The decal will be projected on a surface area inside of the decal box.

In the Properties panel, configure the following fields:

• Local Transform: Use these fields to position, resize and orient the decal. You can also use the Transform toolbar or the manipulators in the 3D View.

• Visible: Select this box to make the decal appear.

• Receive Shadow: If selected, the decal will receive shadows cast by other objects.

• Graphics Material: Click the details button in this field to select a graphics material from the Explorer panel to use as the decal.

• Terrain Decal: Select this box to ensure the decal is only rendered on the terrain. In this way, the decal ignores non-terrain geometry, which is useful to avoid stamping terrain details on vehicles or other objects.

• Override Normals: Select this box to make the decal override the normals beneath it, rather than blend with it. This is useful to draw details like puddles or access hole covers.

• Directional Projection: When selected, the decal will only stamp on aligned surfaces. This is useful to avoid leaking decals on the sides of meshes, or to render snow accumulation, for example.

  
  Selecting this box reveals these parameters:

  • Maximum Surface Angle: Determines the maximum deviation (in degrees) of the surface upon which the decal is projected.

  • Fade Length: Sets the arc length (in degrees) of the decal fade past the maximum surface angle

Adding the Desaturate image effect removes color from the scene. In the Camera Name field, enter the name of a viewport in order to display it in greyscale.

Anti-aliasing is a computer graphics technique used to remove jagged and pixelated edges from images. Vortex Studio supports the following anti-aliasing techniques.

• Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing (FXAA): A post-processing method that does not require large amounts of computing power, trading quality for speed. It smooths jagged edges based on how they appear on-screen, rather than analyzing the 3D model itself. Thus, FXAA will smooth not only edges between triangles, but also edges inside alpha-blended textures or resulting from pixel shader effect. However, textures may not appear as sharp if they are included in the edge detection.

• Multisample Anti-aliasing (MSAA): A special case of supersampling, performed by the graphics card. This technique smooths jagged edges by analyzing the pixels of each frame and performing a smoothing/blending process. The 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x values indicate how many samples are used for each pixel to compute the average that is ultimately displayed. The higher the number, the better the quality of the anti-aliasing at the expense of speed. MSAA is good at smoothing edges and lines, but it isn't as effective at smoothing textures or color detail. Because of the way alpha testing works, the edges of transparent objects (or edges within textures) may be missed, though the quality will be no worse than without anti-aliasing. MSAA is multiple times more calculation-intensive than FXAA or SMAA, so be ready to reduce the sampling if framerate suffers.

• Subpixel Morphological Anti-aliasing (SMAA): A post-processing technique, similar to but slower than FXAA while producing better results. SMAA is better than FXAA at handling sharp geometric features and diagonal shapes by exploiting local contrast features, along with more precise distance searches. However, it requires more system resources.

• SMAA S2x: A hybrid method that first runs the MSAA 4x antialiasing, then follows with SMAA post-processing afterward, aiming to combine both quality and speed. Start here if quality is an important factor for your needs but it is slower than all other options except MSAA 8x and 16x.