Make A Gorgeous Start Menu (Unity UI Tutorial)!

Here are the basics for creating an epic start menu in Unity! Thank you Erik Coburn for coding the final version of the menu system!
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[thomasbrush]

Thanks for watching! Hope you learned a ton.

[_wayneman_]

Just a little advice for everyone who wants to work along with this tutorial: Do NOT animate your UI elements using the Unity animator! Even if the animator is "stuck" on a 1 frame idle animation it will still perform a set-call on EVERY field that is animated (position, scale, rotation, etc.) on EVERY frame of your application. While that alone is reason enough never to do that, it gets even worse: Even though nothing seems to change on your canvas those set-calls trigger the ENTIRE canvas to recalculate every single element it contains.


Solutions:
1) Only animate your UIs via code using coroutines. It is the only way to ensure that nothing is updated when nothing is supposed to happen.
2) If you have an element that has to be animated 24/7 -> put it on a seperate canvas. That way the rest of your UI won't have to be recalculated every frame.
3) Uncheck "raycast target" on EVERY element that isn't interacteable in your design. Only leave it checked for buttons, sliders, etc.. Otherwise you might block input + you will trigger unnecessary calls on object that aren't supposed to do anything.
4) If you fade out elements by reducing the alpha: Consinder ".SetActive(false)" whenever alpha is 0. Just because you can't see it anymore, that doesn't mean the actual mesh isn't updated/recalculated.


Unitys UI system can be a real bitch and performance killer. It might not matter as much for a very small menu scene like the one in this video, but you are going to feel the impact in a game scene that renders hundreds of UI elements + the actual game big time - especially on low end and mobile devices.

[processor]

Before designing those animations I suggest all beginner fellows to take a look at tweening. It will save a lot of time for you.

[ollieolliver]

"Because I am a smart dude, I already have this all set up". I am not a smart dude, which is why I am watching a tutorial, and I have no idea how to set this up. Please don't just skip a huge section like that without linking to another video where you already did it step-by-step.

[TheAmishUpload]

PLEASE make more Unity UI tutorials. This is the best, the music keeps me so engaged!

[ltherix]

"Because I am a smart dude, I already have this all set up". OHH






PLEASE MAKE FULL TUTORIAL

[Abelitro]

I love your content from 3 years ago, keep them comming

[KoiroShi]

I really appreciate this tutorial Thomas Brush, taking this video as a guide worked perfectly for the desired main menu system I got. However, the most important thing is missing. You haven't indicated on changing the main menu to option screen or any of those script in this video since what you did was apply your animation made script to your UI elements and not on a the button component itself.

[rhysxh]

This Game Dev is one of millions of the dev's who can really explain something, nice! :D

[vespirbelmont]

I've been polishing my skills in game dev for a little over a year now. I moved over to Unity to learn arguably the biggest game engine out right now. And I quickly learned all the basic knowledge and how to do things I've already been doing; since if you know how to learn languages moving between engines is a quick transition.

I watched a ton of your videos to get quickly orientated!
And even though I've watched all of your videos a hundred times; I still like to come back because they're very motivational and peaceful.

[mipzy]

Even as an intermediate unity user I still learned something. I didn't know about the use of those green borders in the sprite editor and now I know. Thanks for sharing Thomas!

[JME_]

I love your tutorial! Its rare that background music is actually conducive to helping with a tutorial, but you did it quite nicely. Well done.

[anageingyoungrebel]

Worth knowing you can resize the UI elements uniformly using Alt, but there is a bit of a trick to it: You need to only hold down Alt after you’ve selected a UI corner with the mouse, otherwise dragging with Alt will move/orbit the scene. Loving the videos, keep up the good work!

[danielrigberg]

Thanks for making the assets available!!! I had a hard time figuring out how to get the "canvas (environment)" root for my prefabs, so it was super helpful to be able to click around the sample scene.

[MaThMaTa]

TextMeshPro solves all those spacing issues and crisp text issues and is now part of the Unity package! And also, the "capitalized" format you mentioned is called pascal case format.

[thatwasweird]

Stop complaining guys... he put the full project folder in the description. There you can see where every component and script is supposed to be.




Great vid, helped me a lot!

[michaellalor]

As someone just starting out with Unity and game development in general, I have to say thank you for creating these videos. They are really helping me to get started and learn Unity. Keep them coming.

[evelyneglass]

I need to thank you for just the first few seconds of your video it made me smile, I really needed that today ❤️

[GoldenWind]

Thanks to people like you, others have the opportunity to learn what they want so much.
Tutorial as always very useful and interesting.
Thank you so much!

[krazymantoast]

I paused the video to go watch the trailer for your game, it gave me tingles up and down my spine, in the best way possible. Keep at it!