LED signs and billboards with live content in Unity

Shop fronts, concourses, roadsides and stations are full of LED signs, and most Unity scenes fake them with an emissive texture that never changes. A sign that rotates ads, reacts to the game or shows a freshly downloaded image needs real content handling, and it should still look like hardware when the player walks up to it. LED Studio boards show images, video and text, loop them with transitions and take new content from code. One note on terms: in Unity, a billboard often means a sprite that always faces the camera, while this page is about sign screens.

Sign types and presets

Start in Tools > LED Studio > Board Wizard with the preset closest to the sign:

• Shop and concourse signs: Low Res gives a chunky 40 x 40 grid at P20 for pictograms and short words, and Custom sets any emitter count.
• Roadside billboards: a wide Custom board at a coarse pitch such as P10 or P16, the range the manual suggests for large outdoor boards, with a rear body for a freestanding cabinet.
• Transit boards: Ribbon Board (512 x 16 at P3.9) for a one-line ticker, or a taller board whose zones place destination, platform and time sources side by side.

Physical size follows from emitter count times pitch, and Auto Size From Pitch keeps the transform scale matched. A Low Res sign measures 0.8 m square, and a 480 x 160 board at P16 measures 7.68 by 2.56 m. Pick the emitter shape per sign: Circle for classic outdoor diodes, Square for blocky pixel signs, Hexagon, or LCD RGB for screens seen up close.

Perimeter ribbon boards from the arena film showing ORBIO MOBILE sponsor content.

Images, video and ad loops

Image sources hold posters and logos, and a Video Source plays a clip or URL through the VideoPlayer next to it. When content is larger than the emitter grid, reduction decides how it is sampled: Edge Preserving Sharpen suits images and Box suits video.

A playlist turns these into an ad loop. Each entry shows an image Source Asset or a composition for a set duration, with a transition and a transition duration, and the playlist can loop and carry a sync group ID so several signs rotate together. The 38 built-in transitions plus a hard cut include cross fades, wipes, splits, iris and radial reveals, pushes, zooms, blinds, scanlines, stripes, checkerboards, pixel and noise dissolves, dip to black and flash white. Video needs a scene component, so a video spot joins the loop as a composition layer whose live Input Name the board maps to its Video Source.

The built-in transitions, each captured at 50 percent progress.

Swap content from code

Code addresses sources by their stable Source ID. SetSourceTexture replaces the image of an image source, SetSourceText changes a text source, and SetPlaylist switches the whole rotation, for example between day and night loops. Named ports such as AddImagePort and AddVideoPort create new layers from code. For video, the Video Source exposes its VideoPlayer as Player: assign another clip there and the board prepares and plays the new spot. Downloading new images is your own code, and once the texture arrives, the board takes it like any other:

using System.Collections;
using LEDStudio;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Networking;

// Sketch: show a downloaded image on a sign
public sealed class RemoteAdSign : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] LedBoardController sign;
    [SerializeField] string imageUrl;

    IEnumerator Start()
    {
        ILedBoardRuntime board = sign;
        board.AddImagePort("ad");

        using (UnityWebRequest request = UnityWebRequestTexture.GetTexture(imageUrl))
        {
            yield return request.SendWebRequest();
            if (request.result == UnityWebRequest.Result.Success)
                board.SetSourceTexture("ad", DownloadHandlerTexture.GetContent(request));
        }
    }
}

Your code also owns each downloaded texture, so destroy the old one when you replace it.

Frames, housing and update timing

A sign reads as a physical object once it has a body. Front Frame adds a Chamfer, Round, Cove, Ogee, Stepped or Custom profile around the LED surface, and Rear Body adds cabinet depth with its own side and back materials. The manual’s starting points fit signs well: Cove at 0.025 m width and 0.01 m recess with Rear Body off for a sign set into a wall, and its touring-cabinet values, Chamfer at 0.015 m width and 0.006 m recess with a 0.05 m Rear Body, for a freestanding sign.

Static signs should not redraw every frame. Use On Change source timing for text, images and logos, Fixed Rate for slow feeds, and Target Update Rate for boards whose content rarely changes. For a sign that has seen better days, keep Add Realistic Wear on in the wizard for subtle dim LEDs, flicker and color drift.

The Content Sources manual page covers sources and timing, Compositions and Playlists covers loops and transitions, and the Runtime API page lists every board member. One-line transit boards and crawls are covered in scrolling LED text and tickers.