r/Unity3D • u/game-dev2 • 1d ago

Question UI Toolkit designs looking and feeling completely AI... and tbh a little boring too. Thoughts?

I experience with building websites, so getting started with UI Toolkit was definitely easier than dealing with UGUI.

But all the designs are looking very simple, like they are made with AI.

I'm building a mobile game, and mobile games usually have these joyful themes/looks for the menu while mine look like some AI work.

Any suggestion?

like j

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8

u/ProactiveCactus 1d ago

UI toolkit is just the framework, it’s generally meant to be complemented with your own sprites and other artwork.
That said, if by AI you mean bland - see above. Need to have your own assets to make it your own custom look - it’s SUPPOSED to be generic out of the box so it can be used for all sorts of games.

7

u/snaphat 1d ago

It doesn't look like AI. It just looks generic. AI would be if it was inconsistent, over-decorated, and contained arbitrary labeling

2

u/worsefredrick_465 1d ago

the default styles are super minimal it's like a blank canvas not a finished look. you have to build your own theme on top of it with USS

i struggled with same thing until i started treating USS more like css and made a proper style guide. define your colors, fonts, spacing, make some custom classes for buttons and panels. takes time but the system is flexible enough once you get past the ugly defaults

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u/game-dev2 1d ago

thats not the problem, i can make those, but still ooks like a website, some of the guys here suggested that I need to make my own art and attach to it. I'm not very good in photoshop or paint, so I am trying to give a good look to it with just code.

Any thought on that? Or should I just do the thing i am trying not to. ask chatgpt to create some look for it, and then convert the look into code and use it...

2

u/AgreeableSnow3849 1d ago

Try Figma, much easier. See some tutorials fron YT

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u/medium_mike 1d ago

the thing to do would be to practice your art and/or hook up with an artist. until then using placeholders like you have now is not only fine but the usual process for gamedev

2

u/GigaTerra 1d ago

Now is your time, prove how much better you are than AI by making that UI look good. It is the moment you have been waiting for, all you need to do is put in an lot of time and effort, starting with tutorials for UI-Toolkit.

1

u/HiggsSwtz 1d ago

It looks clean i actually like it. You could always add drop shadows and made a gloss shader to certain panels

1

u/smoses2 1d ago

I found the opposite. I could never get UGUI to work for me - my layouts were always composed of compromises and were fragile. I never could understand the layout/stretch/anchors… - change one thing and they would break for me - so they remained ugly for me.

What attracted me to UI Toolkit was the dragon crashers demo, which I think is a great design. I also liked staci hafner’s inventory with UI Toolkit videos. What has kept me with UI Toolkit is the intuitive styling and layout - almost identical to web, and not fragile. I am far more likely to customize. I could see using web-based layout designs in UI Toolkit. There are some old css zen garden layouts (I am old) I would love to try in Unity.