Liquid Glass - Real-Time Glass UI and Refraction Shader (URP) Unity Asset

Real-time liquid glass for Unity UI and 3D.

Liquid Glass turns any uGUI Image, quad, mesh or sprite into a piece of curved glass. The background bends at the rim like a real lens, blurs from clear to frosted, picks up a bright specular rim, and glass shapes melt into each other when they get close, like iOS Liquid Glass. Everything is live: move the camera, animate what is behind, drag the glass.

It is built for mobile first: the camera image is captured once per frame at reduced resolution, and every glass element on screen reads that one shared capture. All UI glass batches into a single draw call.

Real lens refraction

The background bends at a curved rim, from clear glass to fully frosted, per element.

Shapes that merge

Drag one glass shape into another and they melt together. One draw call per group.

UI and 3D

Canvas UI, world-space quads, meshes and sprites, with a 3D merging group.

Built for mobile

One half-resolution capture per camera and 2 texture samples per glass pixel.

Description

THE GLASS

Lens refraction from an analytic rounded-rectangle shape: rectangles, pills and circles, crisp and anti-aliased at any scale
Clear to frosted: blend between a sharp and a blurred background per element
Specular rim light that favours a light direction, edge glow, saturation, brightness and tint
Optional chromatic aberration at the rim (a shader keyword: it costs nothing when off)
Works under any rotation, scale, Canvas Scaler or perspective camera

SHAPES THAT MERGE

Liquid Glass Group: child glass shapes melt together as they get close, like iOS toolbars and buttons
Drag, animate or tween the shapes: clicks and drags keep working, and the merge follows live
Each shape keeps its own corner radius, rim, refraction and blur; where shapes meet, the settings blend
Up to 16 shapes per group, drawn as one shape in one draw call
3D version for world-space glass quads

UI AND 3D

UI: any uGUI Graphic with the Liquid Glass component; RectMask2D, Mask, CanvasGroup fades and the Image color are supported
3D and 2D world space: quads, meshes and SpriteRenderers with the Mesh shader; size follows the object’s scale
Separate world capture, so world-space glass never refracts itself

PERFORMANCE

One background capture and dual Kawase blur per camera, shared by every glass element
Capture at 1/2 to 1/4 resolution, 1 to 6 blur iterations, blur spread at no extra cost
2 texture samples per glass pixel (6 with chromatic aberration)
All UI glass in one draw call; the Mesh shader is SRP Batcher compatible and supports GPU instancing
Refresh the capture every N frames for static screens, or skip all work while no glass UI is enabled

EASY SETUP

GameObject > UI > Liquid Glass Panel and Liquid Glass Group, GameObject > 3D Object > Liquid Glass Group
The URP renderer feature is added for you; inspectors warn and fix missing setup with one click
Four material presets: Clear, Dark, Chromatic and Mesh
Two demo scenes: glass UI over moving 3D objects, and 3D glass that rotates and merges

FOR PROGRAMMERS

Clean, commented C# in its own assembly definitions; public properties for every per-element setting
A Render Graph renderer feature (no compatibility mode needed)
Full shader source, with the glass shading shared in one HLSL include

REQUIREMENTS

Unity 6 with the Universal Render Pipeline (Render Graph). Tested on Unity 6000.6 with URP 17.6
uGUI for the UI components
Not supported: the Built-in Render Pipeline and HDRP

THIRD-PARTY

The demo scenes use the Nunito font (SIL Open Font License 1.1). See the documentation.

If you have any questions, requests or something isn’t working, please send me an email at: support@hardartcore.com