Building a Custom Unity Pixelated Post Processing Effect in Shader Graph

Lets dive into Shader Graph and how you can use it in Universal Rendering Pipeline Unity projects to create post processing effects for your game. We'll be exploring that by creating a custom pixelation effect that turns any scene we want to render into a pixelated copy of that screen. This allows us to use 3D meshes, high resolution textures and text normally in our scene and still preserve a uniform pixel ratio among all of our assets and even allows us to utilize animations and 3D movement without breaking the effect.
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[@realprodigious]

Nothing else worked, this one is the only one that did. So elegant and simple. Thank you!

[@realzoogies]

Thanks! In case anybody is wondering, to make this only apply to the game and not also the editor camera you can create a new Renderer and add it to the Renderer list, and set your main camera to use specifically that renderer

[@Noxeramas]

Absolutely amazing tutorial, ive been looking for a modern URP17 solution for full screen pixel shader but all ones i can find are using deprecated script references. this works like a charm!

[@holocube]

Great to see you back!! Yay 🎉

[@WorldOfZeroDevelopment]

Excited to be back! Really needed the break but have a lot of fun things I'm excited to share.

[@jimbo_gamedev]

thank you for this tutorial! I just upgraded my project to unity 6 and the old pixelation shader I had wasn't working anymore

[@tnt345i7]

always nice to see somebody come back, now do it so only selected objects get pixelated, f.e. everything but terrain

[@WorldOfZeroDevelopment]

I hadn't thought about using it for something like this, can you help me understand how or why you'd want to do that? Do you want to be able to mask parts of the screen to be pixelated? Do it dynamically?

[@tnt345i7]

​@@WorldOfZeroDevelopment
pretty much, yeah
VFX and decorations mainly, sometimes you want (especially with lower resolutions) some stuff to be sharp and not pixelated, e.g., text and UI. While UI can be rendered separately, in-world text can cause problems. Also, sometimes it's better to have objects pixelated and terrain not pixelated, or vice versa.
pixelated VFX effects are pretty cool. For example, you can pixelate any volumetric explosion (even low poly ones, e.g., in LandFall style), and it will still look good. Of course, they could be prebaked, but y'know it loses its charm, randomness, etc.
Imagine a simple one-color (no texture) seaweed made out of a line renderer that animates by code, e.g., changes the XZ of its joints randomly, multiplied by noise each second or so. It's positioned in a room of, let's say, low-res pixel art textures (like 32x32 or 64x64). If you pixelate everything, the seaweed in question looks good, but in my opinion, the ground and walls lose their charm.
Now, I got kinda close to the desired effect using Shader Graph and Unity's Render Objects feature Render Feature, but I ran into the problem that the mask masks the whole object for rendering and after pixelation it leaves "holes" or cuts off some pixels because it runs postprocessing only on the mask of an object before pixelization, and pixels tend to break those bounds practically always

[@WorldOfZeroDevelopment]

Oooh, this sounds interesting. I think the complex bit is the last part of adjusting the mask. Let me take a look, I think we should be able to pixelate the mask to prevent abrupt cuts in the effect.
Might also be a good time to consider world space pixelation as well.

[@oguz-kagan]

you have greatest content, thanks.

[@thththth-r1d]

Thanks for made tutorial!!! But I want to see this shader only in game tab. how can I do?

[@googleuser4720]

I think we want to see upscale, not downscale lol

[@HALPCat]

speak for yourself, im all about that downscaling baby