Translucent Image - Fast UI Background Blur

Translucent Image is the high performance, battle tested solution for beautiful blurred background UI, like those found in iOS/macOS/Windows 10+ design.

Unlike many other background blurring solutions, Translucent Image employs an extremely efficient algorithm, so your user can enjoy higher framerates and longer battery life. Not only that, it can produce a deliciously smooth effect when you tune the blur up high, unlike many others that would degrade to ugly blocky artifacts.

✨ Features by GIFs

🎮 WebGL and Android Demo

📖 Manual & Documentation

💡  Frequently Asked Questions

» Features Highlight «

- Fastest blur effect on the Asset Store.

- High-quality, smooth blur effect that remains fast even if you blur the whole screen to a single color.

- Simple single number control that ensure optimal performance/quality trade-off without low level knowledge.

- Fully customizable, not only blurriness, but also includes many more effects to make your UI even more delightful to use.

- Advanced, customizable blending ensures sufficient contrast on any background, without washing out background colors.

- Optional procedural UI features with Paraform

More features

- Support normal UI features you expect, like Sliced sprite, Masking, Canvas Group,...

- Support Single Pass Instanced Stereo Rendering

- Maintain similar looks across different resolutions.

- Fully documented, source code included.

- Continuous free updates with new features, and always supporting the latest non-preview Unity release since 2017.

Performance

Translucent Image achieves exceptional performance through a holistic optimization strategy:

- Combine advanced fast blur algorithm with an automatic optimizer that selects the optimal blurring configuration from a single blur strength number. Ensure efficient settings without low-level knowledge.

- Share the same blur texture across many different Images. Or not if you need different blur strengths - just add more Sources.

- Blur only the area of the screen you need, selected automatically by a threaded culling job that stays fast even with many dynamic UIs

- Low-level hook into URP to avoid additional screen copy (Opaque Texture), and allow blurring post-processing effects.

Compatibilities

- Support VR in Single Pass Instanced/Multiview Stereo Rendering mode

- Support the Built-in Render Pipeline

- Support the Universal Render Pipeline in Unity 2021.3+

- URP with the Universal Renderer is fully supported.

- URP with the 2D Renderer is supported in Unity versions that don't have this bug.

- Does not support High Definition Render Pipeline

- Does not support VisionOS

Disclaimer

- Blurring other UIs requires specific setup.

- Usage with world space UI requires specific setup.

- While the asset is much faster than others, blurring can still be demanding on very weak devices, more here.

Have more questions? Feel free to contact me anytime!

🎁 You'll also get 20% off True Shadow with this purchase!

Release Notes

v6.6.2:

 - Fix VR support

v6.6.1:

- Support Paraform 1.2.0

v6.6.0:

- Support URP out of the box without manual package import. Requires 2020.3.16+ (patch version matter)

- Improve support for Unity 6000.4

- Improve world space UI demo to be more clear

- Add a convenient button to create new Material in case of source conflict\

- Fix allocation in the render graph path from residual debugging codes

- Tune algorithm to improve quality at the cost of less strength control. This is a temporary workaround. The next version should improve quality and control greatly

- Fix compilation error if the XR module is manually disabled

- Silent some harmless errors and warnings

v6.5.0:

- Add selector to swap between multiple Sources on the same Camera

- Fix multiple sources not working in URP

- Fix editor error when using Source without Config

- Improve URP compatibility in certain configurations

- Fix demo looking incorrect

v6.4.1:

- Fix compilation error in URP

- Fix brightness control not working correctly in gamma space

v6.4.0:

- Finer brightness control at low brightness. You may need to adjust your brightness value to compensate.

- Fix dithering artifacts at high blur level

- Fix dithering being too visible at low brightness

- Fix blur Strength overwriting settings in Advanced mode when not interacted with

v6.3.0:

- Add a shortcut to edit blur strength from Translucent Image

- Small bug fixes

v6.2.1:

- Fix culling not taking Ring Thickness into account

v6.2.0:

- Paraform: Ring Thickness feature lets you create ring-shaped UIs.

v6.1.0:

- Smoother blur

- New blur Modes:

- Performance mode costs the same as before while being a little bit smoother.

- Balanced mode is extra smooth and costs a bit more.

- Balanced is the new default. If you're targeting low-end hardware, consider setting it back to Performance.

- Fix blur quality being unstable at different resolution

- Fix blur strength not staying constant at different screen density and aspects.

This behavior is now configurable, but should not need to be configured in most cases

- Fix heap allocation when using Render Graph

- Fix minor editor issues

v6.0.0:

!! This is a major release indicating breaking changes !!

- New Colorful Background Mode that maintains both background colors and foreground contrasts

- Move appearance properties out of material, improving scripting ergonomic, performance, and batching efficiency

- Fix dark background being slightly brighter than expected

- Improve URP performance. No longer requires CameraColorTexture

- No longer dispatch an empty render pass if no Translucent Images are visible

- Other minors under the hood fixes and improvements

*Migration*

- Use Tools > Translucent Image > Migrate to 6.0 to migrate all material settings in the opened scene

to the corresponding component. Make sure to have a backup.

- Optional: refactor spriteBlending -> foregroundOpacity

- Optional: try the new Colorful Background Mode. Appearance properties will need to be adjusted.

v5.5.0:

- Display Source's strength in Translucent Image's inspector Source picker to easier distinguish multiple Sources on the same Camera

- Fix some inspector values not updating immediately when changing blur config

- Fix nullref when destroying Translucent Images at runtime

- Fix Skip Culling not working in certain situations

- Fix background not working in certain situations

v5.4.1:

- Fix Translucent Images temporarily stop working after undoing material settings

- Fix erroneous error logging

v5.4.0:

- Fix demo scene colors

v5.3.0:

- Fix vertex color, such as from mesh effect shadow and outline, not being applied correctly

v5.2.0:

- Reduce banding

- Improve default settings

- Improve documentation

v5.1.0:

- Increase the minimum supported Unity version to 2020.3 or BiRP and 2021.3 for URP

- New Cull Padding setting to account for UI movement while using limited Update Rate

- Culling now take into account the Camera's viewport

- Support Rect Mask Softness

- Support Canvas feature: Vertex Color Always In Gamma Color Space

- Fix artifact with certain sprites on hdr background

v5.0.2:

- Fix exception in certain cases

v5.0.1:

- Fix exception in certain cases

v5.0.0:

!! This is a major release indicating breaking changes !!

- Culling system minimize GPU usage by only blur part of the screen covered by Translucent Images

- Significant improvement to CPU usage for scenes with a large number of Translucent Images

- Fix Flatten property not working correctly on dark Images

- Update the demo scenes for the Builtin Render Pipeline to be the same as URP

- Simpler API for controlling blur strength

- Improve compatibility with Unity 6

- Other minor fixes and improvements

Breaking changes:

- Appearance properties on Translucent Image is deprecated. Instead, set these values on the material directly

- TranslucentImageSource.Request() is replaced by (Un)RegisterActivePointsProvider() . This is only needed if

you access the blurred texture directly.

- Extensions methods are moved into helper classes to avoid name collision