[PROBLEM] - POST PROCESS - Volume Material Overrides Camera/Post Process Component Effects

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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I’m working on a project in Unreal Engine and I’m having trouble combining a global Post Process Volume material with additional post-process effects applied to the player camera/player body.

My current setup:

  • I have a global Post Process Volume covering the entire level. (Screenshot included)

  • It uses a custom post-process material, which creates a custom visual style for my game.

  • The material’s Blendable Location is set to Replacing the Tonemapper. This setting is important because it gives me the visual result I want.

  • I also have a separate Post Process Component attached to my first-person character, which I use for gameplay effects such as taking damage.

The problem:

When the global Post Process Volume material is enabled, the post-process effects applied to the player camera do not work as expected. However, when I disable the global material, the camera effects work correctly.

I’ve tried changing the global material’s Blendable Location to other options, such as Scene Color Before Bloom and Scene Color After Tonemapping. In those cases, the camera effects start working, but the pixelated visual style and colors no longer look the way I want them to.

I’ve also checked the priority settings, but changing them did not solve the problem.

What I’m trying to achieve:

I want to keep my global pixelation material working exactly as it does now, while also applying separate post-process effects to the player camera. These effects will eventually include damage effects, color shifts, distortion/warping, and potentially other gameplay-related visual effects.

Ideally, I would like these effects to remain independent and be controlled individually through Blueprints, without having to combine every effect into the global pixelation material.

Is there a way to achieve this while keeping Replacing the Tonemapper enabled? Or is there a recommended workflow for combining a custom tonemapper replacement material with camera-specific post-process effects?

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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Hi! When a post-process material uses “Replacing the Tonemapper”, it takes over the whole tonemap pass. The built-in tonemapper is also what applies things like color grading, vignette, saturation/contrast and film grain from the Post Process settings, so a Post Process Component that relies on those settings has nothing left to act on. That is why the camera effects come back as soon as you move your material to Before Bloom or After Tonemapping.

A few ways to get both:

  1. Keep your pixelation/color-style material in “After Tonemapping” (or Before Tonemapping if you need HDR values) and do the palette/color remap inside the material itself instead of replacing the tonemapper.
  2. Make the damage effect a second blendable (a small post-process material with a scalar parameter such as DamageAmount) assigned in the Post Process Component’s Blendables. Materials at After Tonemapping run after a replaced tonemapper, so it will still show. Drive the parameter with a Material Parameter Collection or a Dynamic Material Instance.
  3. If you still need the replaced tonemapper, bake the damage tint/vignette into that same material, controlled by an MPC value you set from Blueprint when the player takes damage.

Also remember blendables in the same location are ordered by their position in the array/priority, so check that order if the result looks off. Hope that helps!

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I managed to recreate the effect in Unreal Engine by rebuilding the material and adjusting a few settings in the Post Process. Hopefully this will be useful to someone!