I feel like this also is an incorrect approach. Instead of this solution, you might also choose to “hardcode” text sprites, and instantiate individual letters or words as sprites, rather than UIText, but this lacks flexibility and requires you to make a new sprite for each number and word, and essentially recreate the whole business of rendering text from sprites of characters (eg. Here, by following the UI solution, we need to produce two mappings - World Space to the Moving Camera Space, then from a Moving Camera space to a static camera space, with position, rotation and scaling offsets attuned to the time of instantiation. Zooming and rotation of the camera produce an even larger problem. This comes with the rather significant problem of mapping the UI space to the world space, as an enemy at (0,0,0) in world space might have completely different coordinates to place UI on.Īdditionally, since the UI Canvas is usually linked to a Camera, if you have a moving camera (say, in a platformer or top down shooter) that tracks the player, you’ll have to offset the position of the text to compensate for the camera motion.

Motivation - Some Bad Methods UI Animationĭue to how strongly integrated text and Unity UI are, it seems obvious that a first solution is to render a simple “UIText” object above an enemy sprite - that is, a fully UI based solution. There are definitely many approaches to this, but one must beware of inefficient, resource intensive or bug-prone solutions. Making damage numbers or damage text popups appear above a sprite in Unity, at first glance, seems like a simple one. There are various commercial plugins that implement this functionality in Unity 4 such as TextMesh Pro.How to Make Damage Text Popups in Unity Jul 29, 2020 Unity 4 does not support signed distance field text rendering natively. You may need to generate the signed distance field font using a tool such as this. Unreal Engine 4 natively supports signed distance field text rendering. This can also noticeably reduce visual artifacts such as ‘shimmer’ that can appear at the edges of bitmap fonts. Text rendered using the signed distance field approach has the appearance of vector art that maintains clarity at high magnification levels. A threshold shader is then used to compute edges in real-time. Signed distance fields encode the distance from each texel to the edge of the character using a reference bitmap. This has the drawback that characters can't be scaled up or viewed at close-range without losing detail. Bitmap font rendering references coordinates of a texture containing the character set. It would be non-trivial to develop ‘pixel perfect’ techniques as are common to traditional displays and applications.įor optimum clarity and legibility it is recommended to render text using a signed distance field approach as opposed to using traditional bitmap fonts. This, coupled with the head-tracked viewports mean that we cannot guarantee how text positioned in 3D space will appear in screen-space.

The lens distortion correction shader also results in varying display pixel density over the field-of-view, with lower densities towards the extremities of the display. Firstly, and similarly to other texture assets, limitations in display pixel density impact clarity. Text is particularly challenging to display with a high degree of clarity and legibility in the Rift.

Unity 3d text blurry