Stadium screens, scoreboards and perimeter boards in Unity

A stadium in a sports game or a venue visualization needs more than one screen: a big center screen, a scoreboard, ribbon boards along the stands and perimeter boards around the field, all showing game data and sponsor loops. Built from textured quads, each of them needs its own content code and still looks like a flat picture. LED Studio models every display as an LED board with the right pitch and shape, takes scores and clocks from game code, rotates sponsor reels on a schedule and keeps grouped panels in step.

Venue displays and the presets that match them

Most venues combine four kinds of display, explained in more depth in how stadium LED systems work. The Board Wizard has a starting point for each:

The wizard creates the board, its LED material and a Text source. Ribbon Group, Video Wall and Hex Panel Wall create a board group instead, with a Panel Gap for the physical spacing between housings. From LED Studio 1.7.0, the Arena Showcase example plays a 50-second film through a concert and sports arena that combines these displays.

Scores, clocks and zones

Scoreboard data has its own sources. A Score source shows home and away labels, both scores, the period and a clock, and a Timer source counts down in minutes and seconds. Place each in a zone, a normalized rectangle on the board, and add a scrolling Text source as a strip underneath for a crawl. Game code pushes new values:

// Sketch: board is the scoreboard's LedBoardController
board.SetScore("89", "84", "Q4", "02:06");
board.SetSourceText("crawl", "NEXT HOME GAME SATURDAY");

SetScore takes the home score, away score, period and clock as strings and reaches every Score source on the board; SetLabels on the Score source changes the team names. On a Timer source, SetTime, StartCounting and StopCounting run the countdown. Scoreboard digits are ordinary text on the emitter grid, so there is no separate seven-segment component: the examples bundle the DSEG7 Classic and DSEG14 Classic segment fonts as TextMesh Pro assets, and the same board can show a logo or a replay a moment later.

A text scoreboard reading HOME 17 - 10 AWAY in teal emitters, with the period label at the right edge.

Sponsor reels, ribbon groups and live feeds

Sponsor rotations are playlists. A Playlist Asset sequences Source Assets, such as a logo image or a text message, or reusable LED Compositions, each with a duration and one of 38 transitions or a hard cut. Playlists loop, and boards that share a sync group ID read from one clock, so perimeter boards running the same playlist change sponsors at the same moment.

A ribbon that runs along the stands works best as one display. LedBoardGroup composes a master canvas and slices it across its panels, so one crawl or sponsor reel moves continuously from board to board, while each panel keeps its own material, emitters and defects. Horizontal, Vertical, Grid and Radial layouts map the canvas across regular arrangements, and Spatial layout follows each panel’s physical position and size, gaps included.

Perimeter boards along the court showing an ORBIO MOBILE sponsor message, with a larger screen behind them.

For the center screen, render a camera into a render texture and give the board a Render Texture source; video and camera feeds on LED screens covers that route and its options. Charts from Chart Guru appear through its optional LED Studio integration package, which adds a LedChartDataSource component, for example for live match statistics.

Use the screens of an existing stadium model

Stadium environment packs often come with their own screen meshes, and those can become LED boards. Add a LedBoardController to the screen object, set Material Index to the screen’s material slot and assign an LED Board material to that slot or as Material Override; when the renderer sits on another object, Target Renderer points the board at it. LED Studio leaves custom meshes in place and only regenerates meshes it generated. The shader lays the emitter grid over the mesh’s first UV channel, so the screen face needs UVs that cover the 0 to 1 range, and an emitter count that matches the screen’s proportions keeps the grid undistorted.

A wide arena view: a spherical display above the stage, a center screen with a logo, hexagonal panels and a perimeter ribbon.

Keep a full venue fast

A venue holds many boards, and most of them change rarely. Set a Target Update Rate on slow signs instead of composing every frame, use On Change, Fixed Rate or Manual source timing for static text and logos, and keep Every Frame for video and camera feeds. A shared LedQualityProfile applies the same update budget, reduction and bloom settings to many boards, and Close-Up Mode can stay off for boards the camera never approaches. MarkSourceDirty refreshes a source with Manual timing, optionally limited to a rectangle of it.

The manual’s Multi-Panel Boards and Sync page covers board groups and sync groups, and Performance Guidance lists the settings that keep many boards cheap.