Bread UI

BreadUI is a powerful shader-based visual effects package for Unity UGUI. Turn ordinary UI Images into stunning visuals — shapes, outlines, glows, blurs, distortions, procedural animations, and more — all from a single optimized component that draws most effects in the image's own pass.

Core

- Drop-in replacement for Unity's Image component

- Supports all sprite types: Simple, Sliced, Tiled, Filled

- Efficient material pooling — identical configurations share materials automatically

- Stacked effects render in the image's own draw, and images with identical settings batch together (Background Capture, RT shadows and Soft Mask add their own render passes)

- Works with Unity's Mask and RectMask2D, including RectMask2D softness

Procedural Shapes (SDF)

- Rounded Rectangle, Circle, Ellipse, N-Star, Sine Wave, Cross, Heart, Parallelogram, Rhombus

- Custom Sprite SDF clipping with async GPU readback

Border / Edge Effects

- Outline (with gradient support), Stroke, Glow, Inner Glow, Inner Shadow

- Bevel / Emboss (Inner, Outer, Pillow)

- Fire Border, Electric Edge

Color / Rendering

- Gradation (Linear, Radial, Angular, Diamond)

- Hue Shift, Brightness, Saturation, Contrast, Invert

- Posterize, Gradient Map, Vignette

Distortion

- Chromatic Aberration, Swirl, Pinch/Bulge, Wave, Pixelate, Glitch

Blur / Glass

- Background Capture + Dual Kawase Blur for frosted glass

- Lens — Liquid Glass refraction with Fresnel rim and directional glare, rounded through sharp corners at the High quality tier

Texture / Layer

- 2 independent texture Layers with blend modes and UV scrolling

- Dissolve with dual texture mapping

Procedural Animation

- Particle — texture-based spawning with lifetime, gravity, and rotation

- Liquid Surface — Water, Lava, Caustics, Frost (Voronoi-based)

- Flow Field — directional fluid flow with fill control for gauges

- Fire Fill / Electric Fill — procedural flame and lightning

- Shine — sweeping light band (Band, Sweep, Sheen) that bends around Bevel and Lens surfaces, with Linear, Smooth, In, Out and InOut easing

Retro / Stylized

- Noise, Dithering, Halftone, Scanlines, Edge Detection

Vertex Gradient

- Horizontal, Vertical, Edge (4-corner) gradient

Additional Components

- BShadow — drop shadow with falloff

- BMask — animated BImage effects on masks, Soft Mask with RenderTexture-based alpha clipping, invert, rotation and nesting

- BSoftMaskable — Soft Mask for Image, RawImage, Text and TextMeshPro (including fallback fonts and sprites)

- BLowResCanvas — low-resolution rendering for mobile optimization

Performance

- Optimized for mobile (shader variant reduction 2,048 → 32, branchless operations)

- Reference-counted material pooling that reuses materials and lookup textures across rebuilds

- SDF generation cache

- Soft Mask dirty flag system, mesh caching, single-channel mask textures and allocation-free redraws of animated masks

- Shared Background Capture backdrops: panels that cannot read each other reuse one captured background, so stage re-renders, canvas rebuilds and blur passes scale with backdrop count instead of panel count (measured 3.8x faster frames with 22 capture panels)

- Reused camera and canvas-discovery buffers, typed draw keys and capture-SSAO settings reduce steady-frame Background Capture allocations while preserving live scene changes

- Blur outputs with identical effective offsets are shared within the same captured backdrop

- Conservative zero-alpha Liquid Surface shader specialization preserves clipping, stencil and blending, with fallback for custom materials and extensions

- Per-frame capture counters (BackgroundCaptureStats) for budgeting capture-heavy screens

- Mixed glass-and-effect (Composite) images and particles evaluate only the work each pixel needs, with shared effect kernels that keep shader compile time and variant count down

- Quality tiers (BreadUISettings.QualityTier) that trim per-panel shader cost on low-end devices at runtime

Requirements

- Unity 2022.3 LTS or later

- Unity UGUI (com.unity.ugui, declared as a package dependency)

- TextMeshPro (com.unity.textmeshpro on Unity 2022.3, part of UGUI on Unity 6) for sample scene text and TextMeshPro soft masking; import TMP Essential Resources for the sample font

- Built-in Render Pipeline or Universal Render Pipeline (URP)

- Gamma and Linear color spaces supported

Notes

- Background Capture uses a shared capture coordinator with pipeline-specific backends.

- Background Capture groups panels by default (BackgroundCaptureMode.SharedBackdrop); overlapping glass still captures separately so stacked blur is preserved. Set BreadUISettings.CaptureMode to Prefix for a strict per-panel capture.

- URP uses the URP camera stack. Built-in uses a dedicated capture camera and UI presentation camera.

- Built-in post-processing capture depends on the project camera setup and may differ from URP post-processing results.

- On URP 17.3 Forward/Metal, supported Interleaved Gradient SSAO with Depth/Low normals uses an independent capture-only path to stabilize depth boundaries without changing host SSAO, URP sources or project settings. Other versions and modes retain the existing path.