I’m starting a series that teaches Unity UI Toolkit by building a complete inventory and equipment system in Unity 6. By the end you’ll have draggable windows, a full inventory grid with drag-and-drop, an equipment panel with a 3D character preview, and all of it wired up to player data.
Tutorial 1:
This first tutorial, Build Draggable Windows with UI Toolkit, covers building draggable, toggleable windows using UI Toolkit manipulators. Windows also sort to front on click, and their positions will persist between game sessions.
No prior UI Toolkit experience is needed, though you should be comfortable with the Unity Editor and C#.
This tutorial covers designing a complete inventory panel using UI Builder. You’ll build a responsive grid of sprite-based item slots with rarity color tints and hover animations, create reusable UXML templates, organize shared USS variables across multiple stylesheets, nest UXML documents inside each other, and use Flexbox for automatic grid layout. There’s also a quick walkthrough of the UI Toolkit Debugger.
By the end of this tutorial, your inventory window will be fully populated with item icons and rarity borders, all generated at runtime from data. You’ll learn how to create a ScriptableObject item data model, instantiate UXML templates at runtime, generate UI controls from code, and more.
In this tutorial you’ll wire UI Toolkit’s runtime data binding to drive item tooltips. You’ll also add drag-and-drop with a ghost preview that follows the cursor, and a yellow highlight on the slot under the cursor so the player knows exactly where the item will land.
In this tutorial you’ll render a live 3D character inside the equipment window using a dedicated layer, a PreviewCamera, and a RenderTexture displayed in UI Toolkit. Then you’ll write a PreviewRotateManipulator so the player can hold right-click and drag to spin the character.
In this tutorial you’ll finish the equipment flow by adding validation to the equipment slots. You’ll learn how to use UxmlElement and UxmlAttribute to register elements and properties with UI Toolkit and edit them in UI Builder. By the end you’ll not only have slots with validation, you’ll also see an example of tying your equipment system together with your character to toggle item previews on the GameObject.
