Hi, I am a UI designer and I’ve been struggling for two days to implement a specific mobile casual text style in Unity TextMesh Pro (TMP).
My goal is to create a text style like Image 1 : a clean, very thick “External Outline” (outer-only, not eating into the face) combined with a soft Drop Shadow (Underlay) to give it a 3D volumetric look.
However, I am facing the following critical issues with Unity’s default and custom TMP shaders:
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Default TMP Shader Issues: Since the font size is quite large, the outline needs to be very thick.(text size 60) When I increase the
Outline Thicknessand adjusted padding/dilation, the outline clips into adjacent characters and completely hides theUnderlay(Drop Shadow). It seems the outline shader pass masks or covers the underlay effect entirely. -
Text Distortion: If I decrease the font scale to compensate, the text becomes too thin because the default TMP outline center-aligns and eats into the inner face of the font, ruining the original design.
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Custom Shader (External Outline) Issues - Image 2 : I tried using a third-party “TMP External Outline Shader,” but it caused a weird artifact where the outline renders as a vertical white-to-grey gradient, a strange white horizontal bar appears at the bottom of the characters, and the shadow still doesn’t render properly.
What I want to achieve:
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A perfectly clean, sharp, Outer-only Outline that expands outward from the font edge without shrinking the text face.
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A visible, soft Drop Shadow (Underlay) that sits underneath that thick outer outline.
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No text clipping, no broken gradient artifacts, and no white lines at the bottom of the characters.
Should I use a specific multi-pass shader, structure the GameObject with a dual-TMP component approach (one for text face, one for outline/shadow), or is there an optimal Font Asset Creator setting (e.g., higher padding/sampling) to fix this?
Please guide me on how to solve this step-by-step. Thank you!
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