Animated 3D Models on the UI with URP | Unity Tutorial

Learn how to show animated 3D Models on your UI using a Canvas, Render Texture, and any 3d model! This is a great effect to add some personality and flair into your game's UI. You can show enemy types, bosses, the player, unit previews for an RTS, gun previews, and much more with this technique. Best of all it's totally free and easy to do!

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Chapters:
00:00 Overview
01:02 Setting up the Model & Camera
02:43 Create the Render Texture
04:12 Render to the Render Texture
04:24 Show the Render Texture on the UI
04:44 Demo, Changing Render Texture Configuration at Runtime, and the "Gotchyas"
06:49 Important Notes
07:51 Support LlamAcademy!

[FoxxEternal]

Very clean method for adding a 3D character to a 2D canvas. Tried a few methods before finding this video, but those didn't work for Unity 2022.3.x. This one does. Thanks for this dude

[moonasha]

great video, did the trick. I was about to rip my hair out trying to figure how to put a simple shader into the ui. I ended up just putting it on a plane and using this method. Unity is such a pain in the butt sometimes

[taejun]

Super clear! I could've get it even in the overview!

[odyt]

Very helpful! I used this to make an animated tutorial popup. Thanks!

[thepolygonpilgrimage]

Nice work! I did this a while ago with my Battle Royale series. It really is a cool effect :)

[MetasProject]

This is awesome! I would really like to implement something like this in the project I'm making. So finding your video seemed like a sign of god that I should implement this feature.

[roberthawkins]

Great video! Could you possibly do a video that discusses how to build a robust and scalable event based architecture and discuss the best use cases for such a system? I really find the ability to decouple different elements of a system with events to be useful but find that my event manager starts bloating with a ton of unrelated events.

[Gerier]

Great Video. Since the Camera/Model is in the Scene, what is the best way to hide it? Put it far below my Game world and make sure to have the Layer with the enemy disabled on my Main camera to prevent it from rendering in the Game view, just in case?

Another great video (which would be related to this video) would be rendering static Images to get textures for use either in the Game UI or Editor.

[andrewallbright]

I remember one of my early games where I wanted this style effect but didn't know how to do it. This was back when basically everything in unity was confusing (it still is... but less so 😃). So what do I do?

I position 3d models an appropriate distance from of the camera and simulate the screen using colored quads around the models. It was unwieldy... I remember tweaking it tons and how I had to deal with the level clipping through my "UI."

...I learned about rendered textures many many months after that project 😅

[MagnusRazer]

Tengo el problema de que, con el Alpha de la camara, el fondo negro siempre se ve, si lo quito, el objeto desaparece tambien.

[AdrianMeyer]

Doesn't work even if post processing is dissabled. I still see the solid color as background

[andydom]

Great video as always. One problem I'm having with this is if I change the resolution (even if in editor by doing a maximise) then the camera position is wrong after the change. I guess this is to do with aspect ratio and distance from the subject but how would I fix this? Thanks.

[whitneysmiltank]

Thanks for sharing. I imagine this works with hdrp too?

[andydom]

HI, did you ever work out a way of getting post processing on but make it transparent background. This seems a real issue as I need post processing for my custom effect and need it on. However a coloured background does not work for me as it ruins the UI and I have different UI background shades. Do you know of any solution to this? Thanks

[MASTONGAMES]

I once imported a character model with more bones than mixamo base, When I converted to human bones There were several error logs showing that the bones did not match. Human bones can only be used on mixamo characters?