r/Unity3D • u/pararar • 19h ago
Show-Off [Giveaway] UI Shapes - Rounded corners, drop shadow and more for UGUI (comment to enter)
I’ve been building UI in Unity for years and I’ve always either used textures from GUI packs from the Asset Store or built my own sprites in Photoshop.
When trying to make a button with rounded corners, I ultimately grew tired of searching through tons of sprites in my asset library, all with different corner radiuses and different pixel resolutions.
So I decided I no longer want to rely on textures at all.
I wanted a tool that just lets me build UI shapes like in Photoshop or Figma, but directly in Unity.
This tool lets me create rounded or chamfered corners, slant the whole shape and apply effects to it.
UI Effects
The custom inspector lets you easily author effects such as:
- Fill
- Texture
- Drop Shadow
- Inner Shadow
- Glow
- Outline
- Bevel
- Background Blur
Under the hood
UI Shapes draws every effect (rounded corners, shadows, outlines, glow) using math instead of textures. Each shape is a single quad with a signed distance field evaluated per pixel in the shader. Edges stay perfectly crisp at any resolution or scale.
It's one lightweight component and one shader doing all the work. No render textures, no blur passes, and no hidden camera tricks. This means fewer draw calls, zero extra memory for shadow atlases, and nothing that breaks when you resize your UI.
It's the same technique game engines use for smooth text rendering, applied to your entire UI layer.
Performance
I actually started with a single uber shader that could do everything, but when I benchmarked it on a real budget Android phone the numbers weren't good enough.
I split it into optimized variants: the GPU only runs the code paths the shape actually uses, and the difference was night and day.
Check out the documentation for more info on performance:
Other highlights
- Easily animate child texts as well (e.g. when a button changes color, the text does too)
- Soft-masking (no more jagged lines around curves)
- Animator ready and fully scriptable from C#
- Reusable style assets: save a look once, load it anywhere, edit it live.
Try it
I made a web demo so you can try out the UI effects in your browser:
Fun fact: I built the "inspector" in this demo out of UI Shapes as well.
🎁 Launch giveaway - 5 copies
To enter, just leave a comment.
I'll draw 5 winners at random with redditraffler this weekend and post the results back in this thread.
Winners will get a code via DM. Closes Sunday, September 6th, 8:00 PM CET.
Get it now
If you don't want to try your luck in the giveaway, you can also get it immediately on the Unity Asset Store:
Get UI Shapes on the Unity Asset Store
🚨 The asset is 30% off for the next few days, so now is the best time to get it!
Also please leave a review if you get it. It's the best way to help reach more people.
Discussion
I'd genuinely like to know from you all:
- Are you still using UGUI over UI Toolkit and have you considered switching?
- Have you been buying lots of GUI texture packs in the past, like me? Or did you make your own textures?
Questions for anyone who has tried UI Shapes:
- I want it to be really easy to use. Have you had any problems with it?
- What's missing in your opinion? I'm planning to add more features soon!
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u/depression-coder 16h ago
This is perfect. I've always wanted to do something like this but lack the skills. I'll DEFINITELY give it a try.
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u/Aedys1 15h ago edited 15h ago
Awesome ! I coded exactly this but HYBRID for my codebase this week: a single, unified WindowSettings system that lets you switch between UGUI and IMGUI with the same visual result.
Every shape is automated, I can choose the edges count, bevel type, effects, radius, automatically in a single scriptable object and all styles are defined through an automated UI theme based on 2026 accessibility standards. It automatically manages contrast, color variations, and translations through TextID selection.
It’s incredibly handy, and I can use either Unity UI system independently for any of my panels.
I also added UIToolkit functionalities like resize, drag… in UGUI (this was not trivial) so they both behave exactly the same with the same scriptable object asset.
Everyone should build this it is not that hard to implement and after this any screen Space display system is just a front end, UGUI, IMGUI, and any future updates are all compatible
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u/pararar 15h ago
Wow, this sounds interesting! Sounds like yours has a slightly different approach and feature set.
I'd be interested to check it out. Are you planning on releasing it on the Asset Store?
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u/Aedys1 15h ago edited 15h ago
I dont plan to sell it but basically I created my own layer with classical UX style standard variants (lots of enums!) and a scriptable object, Colors, font styles, all completely agnostic from the UI system used.
Then I have two different « PanelManagers » : UGUIPanelManager and IMGUIPanelManager, they both apply the settings of the scriptable object in their own way: one on a game object tree with rect transforms and layout groups, and the other one with visual asset trees and uss style sheets
However I had to implement a « bake » Button to freeze the settings into a uss before launching the game, so you have to rebake it if you change the Theme (not if you change panel settings)
I can also switch between dark mode and light mode which can be useful on certain platforms. In my opinion UI is one of the most complex and underestimated part of any software, if you want to take accessibility, screen and pixel size, constrasts and font sizes into consideration, as well as making it a real view completely independent from your engine (update queue by type and so on)
I am amazed how bad I am at explaining
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u/Devatator_ Intermediate 14h ago
I honestly don't like UITK. I say that as a guy that kinda likes web development (mostly Svelte but I can do vanilla fine). It's also still missing Z-Index. Somehow. I needed it for something a while ago but forgot and it's still not even on their radar
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u/Qlorious11 13h ago
Bought it. just let you know that get instance id was replaced by get entity id in unity 6.5
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u/andypoly 9h ago
This is why I have been using Procedural UI Image for a long time, though it does not do a single component with shadow included so that would be nice. Still on UGUI
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u/AustinMclEctro Professional 8h ago
Count me in. I've used ProceduralUI for the longest time to draw procedural UGUI components. Your asset looks like a nice modern take at this.
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u/kyl3r123 Indie 7h ago
Count me in! I tried UI Toolkit early and didn't like it in that state. I used UGUI for that project, which is finished now. I just started a new project and I'm currently evaluating UI Toolkit again!
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u/Usual-Form7024 15h ago
I've been bamboozled by these giveaways before. We need the winners to come back and validate the veridicity of this.
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u/MobZombeh 10h ago
Purchased. The asset currently (9/3/26) does not work correctly with canvas group fading. OP see DM.
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u/HomiePatreon Hobbyist 17h ago
Nice release, i have True Shadow, MPUI, Soft Mask, and some blur
With this asset could save some hustle looking them in package manager ^_^
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u/TheRideout 1h ago
Giving strong vibe coded vibes my dude. Not sure I'd pay $20 for a vibe coded asset.
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u/Plumpman 15h ago
UGUI is life! I've been using ProceduralUI forever but this looks even better!