
Unity UI Cookbook
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Often, we need to place a lot of objects in their correct and symmetric positions within our UI or in a nested element. Luckily, Unity has an auto-layout system that provides ways to nest UI elements into other UI elements. It is controlled by the UI layouts components that allow us to structure our UI. Learning how to master them is crucial for quickly creating clean UIs and achieving our design goals. In fact, this is the purpose of this recipe.
The Auto-Layout system is composed of two different kinds of elements: Layout Elements and Layout Controllers. To understand the former, note that every game object that has a Rect Transform, and eventually other components, is a layout element. These types have certain knowledge about what size they should be of, but they do not control it directly. Layout controllers, instead, are components that control sizes and also positions of one or more layout elements. They can control their own Layout Element or child Layout Elements of the game object to which they are attached.
In this example, we used Horizontal Layout Group (Script), Vertical Layout Group (Script) and Grind Layout Group (Script). They work in similar ways. Furthermore, they take care of the layout of the children inside the game object to which they are attached, and restructure the positions of the UI elements.
If you want to learn more about layout controllers, you can go to the official Unity documentation at the following links:
Downloading the example code
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