AnchorKit — Nameplates & world-anchored HUD for UI Toolkit

AnchorKit pins your UI Toolkit elements to points in the 3D scene and keeps them there — nameplates over heads, health bars on vehicles, markers on pickups, quest arrows on doors. It handles the hard part: billboarding, distance culling, occlusion behind geometry, level-of-detail, off-screen indicators and pooling. Drop in a prefab, point it at your object, and ship.

Built entirely on UI Toolkit (UIDocument). Not uGUI. If your HUD is UI Toolkit, this is the world-anchoring layer it has been missing.

WHAT IT DOES

• Anchor any VisualElement to a transform, a bone or socket, or a fixed world point — top of bounds, centre, or a custom offset.

• Screen mode (crisp, fixed pixel size) or World mode (scales and tilts with distance).

• Occlusion — a plate hides when world geometry blocks its target, fading smoothly in and out.

• Distance LOD — hand a plate from full detail, to a compact form, to a single icon as its target recedes.

• Off-screen indicators — a target that leaves the view pins to the screen edge as an arrow that points at it, clear of notches and safe areas.

• Update budget and throttling — cap how many plates update per frame and refresh distant ones less often, so a crowd of hundreds stays bounded.

• Overlap separation — push stacked plates apart so every one stays readable.

• World-driven pooling — elements are recycled as targets come and go; no per-frame allocations.

THE NAMEPLATE BUILDER

Assemble a plate from parts — status line, name, level, bar, value, armour, distance, icons, off-screen arrow, optional backing — in a ScriptableObject, with a live preview on light and dark backdrops right in the Inspector and a dockable preview window that stays put while you scroll. Seven ready looks are included (Default, Sci-fi, Fantasy, Minimal, Tactical, Slim, Squad). Or anchor your own UXML — AnchorKit anchors any element.

DROP-IN AND CODE-LIGHT

• Three ready prefabs: Enemy Nameplate, Boss Nameplate, Pickup Marker. Drop one in, set its Target, done.

• One-click scene setup from the GameObject menu.

• Feed a health bar in a single call — SetValue(current, max) fills the bar and writes the number.

• Genre presets: Shooter, RPG, Strategy, Tower Defense.

FLOATING COMBAT TEXT

Rising, fading damage, heal and pickup numbers with accumulation and a hard pool ceiling — a whole extra system, included.

BEFORE YOU BUY

AnchorKit ships no art. It anchors your element; the sample plates are plain UI Toolkit you can restyle or replace. Gamepad focus and screen flow are not its job — it is the layer between the UI and the world.

REQUIREMENTS

• Unity 6.3 (6000.3) or newer.

• UI Toolkit runtime (UIDocument). Not uGUI.

• Built-in, URP and HDRP — nothing in the code touches a render pipeline, and the demo builds its own camera and light, so it drops into any project.

A full manual and scripting reference are included.