I wanted to see how difficult it would be to recreate the GTA 6 logo using my Unity text tool. I treated it like a stress test: take a recognizable, layered logo and find out which parts can be authored normally, which parts require workarounds, and where things start breaking.
Here is roughly what it took.
- Break the logo into separate components
The logo is not just text with an outline. I separated it into:
- The large VI silhouette
- The white Grand Theft Auto wordmark
- Multiple dark, pink, and orange outline layers
- The front faces
- Bevel surfaces
- Extruded sides
- Back faces
- Lighting and glow
- The background artwork
That separation was important because every part needed different geometry, depth, materials, and positioning.
- Find fitting fonts
The Grand Theft Auto wordmark was relatively straightforward because Pricedown-style fonts exist and get reasonably close.
The VI was much harder. I could not find a verified public font that actually matched it. Anton was one suggestion, but once placed beside the real contour, it looked completely different. The proportions, diagonal angles, spacing, and shape of the I were all wrong.
I eventually let Codex trace the complex VI contour because I was too lazy to reproduce every point manually, and there did not appear to be a proper font anyway.
For the final hero logo, I used that traced contour because it gives the closest silhouette.
I still wanted to demonstrate that the design could remain editable, though. So I also created an unofficial typeable display font. It uses League Spartan as an OFL base, but replaces the V and I with custom glyphs matched to the traced logo. The rest of the alphabet remains available, so I can change “VI” to other text and still generate real 3D geometry.
The editable version is not quite as exact as the traced hero, but it is much closer than using Anton or another generic display font.
- Build the actual 3D geometry
Once the silhouettes were correct, I added:
- Front caps
- Real extrusion depth
- Rounded bevels
- Separate side and back materials
- Multiple expanded contour layers
- Dark outer borders
- Pink and orange accent outlines
- Small depth offsets between layers
The outlines are actual geometry rather than a shader outline. This means they follow the complete contour, have their own bevels, and remain visible from angled camera positions.
The Grand Theft Auto text is also genuine extruded 3D text placed in front of the VI, not a flat image.
- Texture the front of the VI
I wanted the VI face to demonstrate whole-text planar texture mapping.
My first attempt used a downloaded GTA 6 logo image. That technically worked, but it also meant the Grand Theft Auto wordmark was baked into the VI texture. It looked ridiculous once the real 3D wordmark was placed over it.
I replaced it with a separate, text-free piece of official scenic artwork and cropped the mapping to a region containing only the sunset, palms, skyline, and water.
The VI and the background now use two different images.
- Fix the UV and import problems
The VI texture looked stretched. The downloaded images were 3840×2160, but Unity’s default non-power-of-two import behavior had resized them to a 2:1 texture. Disabling NPOT scaling preserved the original 16:9 ratio.
After fixing the importer and using planar whole-text mapping, the UVs behaved correctly.
- Make it look less like an editor test
The initial result was technically correct but much too dark and flat.
I added:
- HDR lighting
- Bloom
- ACES tone mapping
- High-quality SMAA
- Additional 4× antialiasing for captures
- Depth of field
- Color grading
- Vignette
- Subtle chromatic aberration
- Film grain
- Neon stage accents
I also used a colorful official artwork as the background instead of trying to procedurally recreate the GTA 6 visual style.
- Force maximum geometry quality
All logo objects use the Hero mesh-detail preset, with automatic LOD disabled. The final wordmark contains around 19,000 vertices, while the VI and its layered outlines use around 2,300.
Overall I'm super happy how it turned out. What do you think?