Unified Blur

Enhance your project quality with a clean and performant screen blur effect, built for Unity 6 and beyond using Render Graph.

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Introduction

Unified Blur is a powerful and flexible screen blur effect for Unity, built using the new Render Graph API. It is designed to be easy to use, efficient, and highly customizable. Unified Blur is perfect for creating clean translucent effect for you application.

Note: Since Unified Blur is built on top of new Render Graph API, it is not compatible with older versions of Unity.
To access last version of Unified Blur that supports older versions of Unity, please visit Latest Legacy Branch.

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Behind the Scenes

Unified Blur works by inserting a custom render pass into the render graph, at a specific point that is configurable, which copies back buffer and applies a blur effect to it. After the render pass is complete, blurred image is available via global texture for future objects rendered to use.

Use Cases

Unified Blur is best used with UI components that are part of the Screen Space - Overlay canvas. But, it does support other canvas types as well, although with some limitations (check out limitations section).

• Option 1: UI Image Component with Blur Material
  Display a blurred version of the screen on a UI Image component. This is useful for creating translucent UI effects.
  
  
• Option 2: Custom Shader with Unified Blur
  Use global texture generated by Unified Blur Render Feature in your custom shader to create unique effects.

Installation

• Unity Package Manager - Copy git url and add it via package manager's Add package from git URL... (for a specific version visit releases).
• Open UPM - For more information, visit OpenUPM Page.
• Manual - Download zip, extract and put its content anywhere in the project (preferably in Plugins folder).

Setup

1. Add Unified Blur Render Feature
   Add Unified Blur Render Feature to the renderer data that is being used by the project. This can be done by selecting the renderer data asset and adding the feature in the inspector.
2. Assign Blur Material To UI Image Component
   Assign UniversalBlurUI material to any UI Image component that you want to display the blurred screen on.
3. Play with Settings
   Adjust settings in the Unified Blur Render Feature settings to get the desired blur effect.

Limitations

• Limited support for world space or screen space camera canvases.
  To enable this kind of support, change injection point in Render Feature's settings panel to BeforeRenderingTransparents. Note that, transparent objects and other canvases will not be visible in this scenario.