UMG Text Effects is a new plugin from our small studio, Barbed Wire Glove Games. It animates UMG text letter by letter, and you control it with short tags in the text:
Hello <wave>traveler</>, the <angry>dragon</> is <rainbow>awake</>!
- Epic’s Rich Text Block keeps working. Add the UTE Text Effects Decorator to a block you already use, and its style rows and inline images still render as before. There’s also a UTE Text Block widget with the effects built in.
- 50 effects and 32 presets. Motion, rotation, scale and shape, color and opacity, and special rendering (wipe, roll, decoder, glitch, marker…). Presets cover moods and game moments, such as
<whisper>,<titledrop>and<damagenumber>. You can save your own presets without code. - Typewriter with pauses, speed changes, wait-for-input, inline events, skip and hide. Text keeps its style rows while it types, and the layout is fixed from the first letter, so words don’t hop between lines.
- Designer preview. The UMG Designer shows the effects and the typewriter running live, before you hit Play.
The plugin doesn’t create a widget per letter. Letters that only shift position share one draw element per block, and text that has finished animating is drawn by Epic’s standard code in most cases. On our PC (Ryzen 9 7950X3D, RTX 4090, UE 5.7), 2,000 characters of wave took 0.07 ms more Slate time than stock text, and rainbow took 0.76 ms more. The plugin ships a UTE.Bench command so you can measure on your own hardware.
UE 5.4 to 5.8. Windows, plus Android (arm64, built on all five versions). Full C++ source, and Blueprint-only projects can use all of it. There’s a demo map with every effect and preset and a dialogue box. Made with AI-assisted development; 105 automation tests included.
Fab: UMG Text Effects - Text Animation & Typewriter for Rich Text and Dialogue | Fab ($24.99 Personal, $49.99 Professional)
Docs (free to read): UMG Text Effects | Per-letter text effects and a typewriter for Unreal Engine UMG. Documentation.
Questions and requests are welcome here.