Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By : Francesco Sapio
Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By: Francesco Sapio

Overview of this book

With the increasing interest in game development, it's essential to design and implement a UI that reflects the game settings and shows the right information to the player. The Unity system is used to create complex and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces in order to give a professional look and feel to a game. Although the new Unity UI system is powerful and quite easy to use, by integrating it with C# scripts, it's possible to realize the potential of this system and bring an impressive UI to games. This guide is an invaluable collection of recipes if you are planning to use Unity to develop a game. Starting with the basic concepts of the UI components, we’ll take you all the way through to creating complex interfaces by including animations and dynamics elements. Based on real-world problems, these recipes will start by showing you how to make common UI elements such as counters and healthbars. You will then get a walkthrough of how to manage time using timers, and will learn how to format them. You will move on to decorating and animating the UI elements to vivify them and give them a professional touch. Furthermore, you will be guided into the 3D UI world and into HUD scripting. Finally, you will discover how to implement complex minimaps in the interface.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity UI Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making UI elements affected by different lights


To give a professional touch to our user interface, we can add lights to it. This could be effective if we want to create a specific type of atmosphere or emphasize an element. In fact, Unity allows us to alter UI elements by light. In this recipe, you will learn how to create two UI elements and, using layers, how to have them affected by different lights. In order to do this, we will add two new layers, create a new UI material, and of course play with lights.

How to do it...

  1. We need to create two panels that are slightly separated, as shown in the following screenshot. From this, you can learn how to affect different UI elements with different lights. To create the panels, right-click on the Hierarchy panel and then click on UI | Panel. Furthermore, to be more ordered, we can rename them as Panel01 (the one on the left) and Panel02 (the one on the right).

  2. Now, we have to change the render mode of our canvas. Hence, select it from the Hierarchy...