What’s new in UI Toolkit
UI Toolkit is a collection of features, resources, and tools for developing user interfaces and Editor extensions. In the 2021 LTS, it supports creating and debugging runtime UI for games and applications with an intuitive workflow that helps artists and designers get started faster.
Discover the features and learn what you can achieve with UI Toolkit.
Get started with dedicated authoring tools
UI Toolkit’s dedicated authoring tools include the UI Builder and UI Debugger, inspired by web technologies to offer a familiar experience. Use the UI Builder to visually create and edit UI for games and applications directly in Unity, while the UI Debugger helps you resolve issues quickly.
Render dynamic text
The font rendering technology of TextMesh Pro has been integrated into UI Toolkit to help you get started without additional plug-ins or packages. You can now use advanced styling capabilities to cleanly render beautiful text at any point size and resolution.
Animate UI with lightweight transitions
UI Toolkit comes with a dedicated UI animation system that simplifies the production of UI transitions in your projects. This new system even allows the efficient authoring of reusable transitions, the majority of animation in most UI projects, to save you valuable design time.
Harness crisp, textureless UI rendering capabilities
Set border radius, color, size, and text to create textureless UI elements directly in the UI Toolkit. Stop creating and importing images from Photoshop to significantly reduce the time wasted transitioning between tools, while also lowering the overall memory footprint and build size to scale more efficiently.
Develop custom UI and extensions for the Unity Editor
UI Toolkit includes a retained mode UI framework that simplifies the development of custom UI for Unity Editor extensions, so you can build unique windows and inspectors to power streamlined workflows for artists, designers, and programmers.
Compare Unity UI systems
Although Unity recommends using UI Toolkit for new UI development projects, there are still cases where it makes sense to use older systems due to features found in Unity UI (uGUI) and IMGUI. Compare UI systems in Unity to evaluate what works best for you.
Resources
User interface design and implementation in Unity
This 130+ page guide will show you how to build sophisticated interfaces with Unity’s two UI systems, Unity UI and UI Toolkit. We introduce UI Toolkit concepts like responsive UI, UI Builder using the UI Toolkit Demo - Dragon Crashers.
Community
Access the forums to get help from the community and hear the latest about the UI Toolkit in Unity.
Frequently asked questions
UI Toolkit is recommended as an alternative to Unity UI for creating screen overlay UI that runs on a wide variety of screen resolutions. It should be considered by those who produce work with a significant amount of user interfaces, require familiar workflows for artists and designers, and/or seek textureless UI rendering capabilities.
Unity UI is the recommended default solution for users who need UI positioned and lit in a 3D world, as well as VFX with custom shaders and materials, and easy referencing from MonoBehaviours.
UI Toolkit is compatible with Unity UI, so you can transition existing projects without having to rewrite the entire user interface. This means that you can recreate parts of an existing project with UI Toolkit while leaving the rest in Unity UI, to have them working in conjunction on the same project.
UI Toolkit does not currently support UI elements that are positioned or lit in a 3D world. It is possible though to have screen space UI elements following world space objects.
You can interface with UI Toolkit from DOTS Systems on the main thread, like other built-in engine features.
UI Toolkit does not currently provide a data binding solution, UI element values must be set via C# code. Data binding is planned for the next major UI Toolkit release.
Yes. Even though experimental packages are not officially supported by Unity and therefore not recommended to be used in production, UI Toolkit will support SVG assets if the Vector Graphics package is installed.
UI Toolkit is available as part of the 2021 LTS release. Get access to UI Toolkit from the Unity Hub or on our download page.
Our goal for UI Toolkit is to provide a single solution for producing user interfaces that will meet all the needs of developers and designers working on Editor tools or runtime interactive experiences.
You can follow the latest updates of UI Toolkit by visiting our new Unity Platform Roadmap, and please share your feedback directly with the product team.