Persona

Effects process the rendered frame. Each effect has a row in the Scene Effects group above the layer list. Add it from the Inventory’s Scene Effects category, use the eye icon to enable or disable it, and select it to adjust its parameters below the list. Effects that have not been added do not appear in the list or affect existing scenes

The few things that apply to the whole frame and belong to no single effect — tone mapping, exposure and the LUT — stay in the look rows at the end of the Stage detail's Environment section

Each effect belongs to the scene, so two scenes can put the same avatar through completely different looks

Supported Scenes

The chain runs on the 3D stage, so effects can be added — and the look rows show — once a scene contains a model, Live2D or VRM, or a 3D object layer

In a scene of 2D objects alone, the Inventory's Scene Effects category is disabled with a line saying why, and the Environment section disappears

The Chain

Stylize

These two run in the same chain but visibly transform the image itself — useful to punctuate a movement or cover a transition

Scene Effects and Layer Effects

An effect can be added in two places, and both use the same controls:

• A scene effect acts on the whole composited frame — the chain this page describes
• A layer effect acts on one layer alone, before it joins the scene — see Effect Layers

Layer effects are what let you blur a background while the avatar stays sharp, or grade a single prop on its own. They apply to models and to objects in 3D space

Not every effect can be used as a layer effect. These twelve work in both places:

Color Grading, Levels, Color Wheels, Color Shift, Select Colors, Gradient, Blur, Bloom, Diffusion, Rim Light, Outline and Drop Shadow

The rest are scene-only: Flare, Depth of Field, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain, Vignette, Pixelate, Subspace Glitch™, Droplets, Rain and Snow. Each either needs scene depth, is scene geometry in its own right, or is meant to sit over the finished frame by design

Look

The look rows, at the end of the Environment section, hold overall display settings. These controls are not added as individual layers:

Order

Effects run in a fixed order that cannot be changed by rearranging layers. When multiple effects are enabled, each processes the result of the previous stage:

1. Depth of Field — first, because it is the only built-in stage that reads scene depth
2. The Live2D layer, which also carries images and videos in 2D space — after depth of field, since flat art carries none, but before every colour stage, so both kinds of avatar are graded as one image
3. Rim Light → Outline → Drop Shadow — the silhouette stages, in that order, so the rim stays inside the band and the shadow casts from both
4. Chromatic Aberration
5. Bloom → Diffusion
6. The colour block: LUT → Color Grading → Levels → Color Wheels → Color Shift → Select Colors
7. Gradient — right after the colour block, which therefore never tints it
8. Blur — after grading, so what it softens is an already-graded frame
9. Flare — after blur, so blur does not soften the flare
10. Pixelate and Subspace Glitch™, which warp where the frame is sampled from
11. Droplets — the glass pane sits in front of every screen-space warp
12. Film Grain and Vignette, which stay camera-side of the glass
13. The editor chrome, above everything else

Tone mapping and exposure are not stages in this list — they are the display transform, applied to the finished frame on the way out

Rain and snow are missing too, for a different reason: they are not post stages at all but real geometry in the scene. They are already drawn before the chain begins, so every stage above grades them along with everything else

Layer effects are not in this chain either — each is applied before its own layer joins the scene

Cost

Post-processing runs a full-screen pass per enabled effect, which adds rendering work. Two settings in Settings trade quality for frame rate:

• Render Scale sets how large a canvas the whole 3D stage draws into — lowering the resolution reduces the cost of every effect
• Effects Quality sets the antialiasing these passes use

With every effect off, Persona skips the post chain entirely and renders straight to the canvas — avoiding this overhead in scenes that do not use effects

Over the Plugin API

Every value here is one field of SceneEffects, patched with scene.patch and read back on scene.changed. The shape is deliberately flat — one key per effect, no grouping — so a client can walk the whole registry generically. See the SDK reference

Which effects hold a row under Scene Effects is tracked separately, in environment.effectLayers — a list of built-in effect keys. The two are distinct: enabled is whether the effect is on right now, effectLayers is whether it has a row. Enabling an effect through a patch adds its row automatically, so a plugin never has to write both. However the switch arrives — the panel, an automation or a patch — the frame ramps over 0.4 s rather than cutting, and the numbers and colours an automation applies glide over the same 0.4 s

Layer effects follow the same shape, hung off the layer itself: every model and object carries its own effects and effectLayers, named exactly as the scene's are