Quick UI Blend Pro

You place a design into Unity and it comes out washed out. Or a panel comes out too dark. Sometimes both on the same screen. It is not your export settings and it is not the importer.

Design tools composite in gamma space. Unity, in Linear colour space, converts to linear, blends there and converts back. Same layers, same opacity, different answer:

Base 0.15 with 50% white - design tool 147, Unity 189, off by 42/255

Base 0.30 with 50% white - design tool 166, Unity 194, off by 28/255

Overlay - design tool 153, Unity 78, off by 75/255

Hard light - design tool 230, Unity 157, off by 73/255

Every one of those numbers was rendered in a Linear project and read back pixel by pixel. The deviation grows as the background darkens, which is why it is worst on dark-themed UI.

WHAT IT DOES

• Twelve blend modes - normal, multiply, screen, overlay, darken, lighten, colour dodge, colour burn, hard light, soft light, difference, exclusion. uGUI has none of these.

• Gamma-space compositing in Linear projects, so plain alpha matches your design file too, not only the blend modes.

• Blends with whatever is behind it: the scene, the panel it sits on and other blended Graphics, on Screen Space Camera, Screen Space Overlay and World Space canvases.

• Works on screens you already built, and in your player builds.

NOTHING IS IMPORTED

Select the Graphics you want, pick a mode, press Apply. There is no conversion step and no rebuilt hierarchy. Remove the component and the Graphic goes back to exactly what it was - the original material is remembered and put back, and the backdrop component is removed too once nothing on the canvas needs it. Everything goes through Undo.

HOW IT WORKS, AND WHAT IT COSTS

The hardware blender works in whatever space the render target is in, so a blend-state change cannot fix this. That was tried and measured, and it changes nothing. Gamma-space compositing means reading the destination yourself: Blend Off, read what is behind, blend in gamma, write the result.

The read happens in the shader at the moment the Graphic draws, so the scene and every UI element drawn before it are part of what it blends with. Each canvas decides how often:

• Before each Graphic (the default) - correct over anything, including a list of cards that each carry a blended shadow; one screen copy per blended Graphic.

• Once per frame - one copy when the first blended Graphic draws, shared by all of them; cheaper, and correct as long as nothing a later blended Graphic sits on is drawn after the first one.

Only Graphics that need it pay: Normal at full opacity is exactly what uGUI already does, so those stay on uGUI's own material. Pixels a blended Graphic leaves fully transparent are not written at all, so it never erases what is under it.

ACCURACY

The Formula Check runs all 65,536 base and top byte pairs through each of the twelve modes against the W3C Compositing and Blending reference: all twelve match exactly. The composite still lands in an 8-bit target, so a pixel can sit a step off the ideal value - the maths is exact and the target rounds.

MEASURED

A test project renders known cases and reads the pixels back on Unity 2022.3 and Unity 6, in Linear and in Gamma: 11 of 11 checks pass in all four. In player builds, a 50% white over a 0.15 panel reads 147 - the design tool's value - on a Screen Space Camera canvas and on an Overlay canvas, where plain uGUI reads 189.

IN A GAMMA PROJECT

Plain alpha already matches there, and the window says so instead of pretending to fix something you do not have. The twelve blend modes are what the tool adds.

SAMPLE SCENE

All twelve modes over the same artwork, which sits on the same canvas - so every tile blends with UI drawn before it.

CLEAN AND SAFE

• Namespaced code (Krykftn.QuickUIBlendPro)

• Respects the canvas clip rect and stencil, so masks and ScrollRects keep working

• Shaders ship in a Resources folder, so every player build includes them

• Without com.unity.ugui the tool switches itself off quietly instead of filling your console, and a one-click Setup window installs it

REQUIREMENTS

• Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer (tested on 2022.3 and Unity 6)

• Built-in Render Pipeline - not URP or HDRP, see below

• Unity's UI package (com.unity.ugui) - free

• No external dependencies, no accounts, no plugins

HONEST LIMITS

Built-in Render Pipeline only. The Scriptable Render Pipelines do not run the GrabPass that reads the screen behind a Graphic, so under URP or HDRP the tool refuses to attach and says why, and your Graphics are left exactly as they were. URP support needs a renderer feature and is not claimed until it is built and measured.

Blending needs Blend Off, so the visible pixels of a blended Graphic are written opaque.

No performance figure is quoted. Frame timings taken headlessly are not representative. The cost is one screen copy per blended Graphic, or one per frame, and nothing when every blend is Normal at full opacity.

PART OF A BUNDLE

Quick UI Blend Pro is one of the five tools in Quick uGUI Tools Bundle, together with a recycling list, screen transitions, a contrast-checked palette and every-device screen fit. Owning the bundle makes each paid tool a free upgrade, and Quick Screen Fit Pro is free.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/quick-ugui-tools-bundle-405706