# Introduction to the UI Canvas

> Learn about the UI Canvas and how it positions UI elements in your scene.

Before you can add buttons, images, or interactive menus to your application, you need a foundational layout. The UI Canvas acts as the root container for all 2D user interfaces in Unity Studio, and ensures your dashboards, overlays, and configuration panels render correctly on screen.

## Supported UI elements

Think of the UI Canvas as a blank sheet where you can place your [buttons](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/button.md), [text](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/text.md), [images](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/image-ui.md), and other controls. Every UI element must belong to a UI Canvas.

When you add a UI element to your scene, the element becomes a child of the UI Canvas in the **Hierarchy** panel. The UI Canvas controls how the UI element is positioned and scaled in the scene, and how it responds to different screen sizes.

For a list of all the UI elements you can add to a UI Canvas, refer to [UI Elements available in Unity Studio](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/_index.md#ui-elements-available-in-unity-studio).

## UI element transforms

Each UI element on the canvas uses a UI Transform component instead of the regular Transform component. A UI Transform is a rectangular transform designed for 2D elements.

The UI Transform enables you to move, resize, and rotate UI elements. You can do this directly in the [Scene view](/unity-studio/develop/ui-refs/scene-view.md) or enter specific values in the [Inspector](/unity-studio/develop/ui-refs/inspector-ref.md).

To edit the properties of the UI Transform, select the UI element in the **Hierarchy** panel and view its properties in the **Inspector** panel.

## Multiple canvases

You can create multiple canvases in one project to show different UI layouts at different times. For example, you can create a canvas for your main user interface and a different canvas for contextual menus that only appear when the user interacts with certain objects in the scene.

Each canvas contains a **Canvas** component that controls what order the canvas renders in relation to other canvases.

To add a new canvas, refer to [Create a UI Canvas](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/canvas-ui/create-canvas.md).

## 2D support

Currently, you can only create 2D UI canvases in Unity Studio. 3D canvases aren't supported.

## Additional resources

* [UI Creator](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/.md)
* [Input Field](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/input-field.md)
* [Web View](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/web-view.md)
* [Video](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/video.md)
* [Toggle](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/toggle.md)
* [Slider](/unity-studio/develop/ui-creator/slider.md)