Pulsating glow effect on UI Button

Hi,

I want to implement a pulsating glowing border on a UI button.
Unfortunately the only solution I found requires Unity Pro licence.

Is there any shaders that do this? Or any suggestions on how to implement glowing effect?

There are many approaches to making something appear to glow, that get cleverer as you go on. A common approach if you want the glow to interact with the background is to use an additive shader.

However, I would suggest as your first attempt simply make an image to contain your ‘glow’. Using the sprite system in unity you can create a sprite with a ‘border’ that can be used in the UI image. Check it out in the UI documentation or videos if need be.

Once there, you can create a simple image that contains a blurry border and show it over your button. The more alpha you apply to it, the more it’ll show up.

Here’s a very quick sample I did using this approach:

53558-glowbutton.png

This was just using this simple sprite (EDIT: the sprite is just white with an alpha channel so you can’t see it here, but right click and you should be able to download it!):
53559-blurborder.png

Obviously you can do what you like to that sprite to make it prettier!

You can then control the visibility of the border just by setting its color (critically the alpha channel) in a script.

The next step up would be, as I said, to use a shader that is set to be additive blending instead of the default one, as this ‘adds’ the colour to the background rather than blending with it, which can give a bit more of a lighting effect.