Game panel framing overlays / aspect ratios

Did some searching here and a bit of googling but not finding anything about this.

Aspect ratios - 16x9 is pretty much the default because of the proliferation of HD, but 21x9 is increasingly becoming a desired thing (3440x1440 monitors, 2.35:1 film ratio (not exactly the same but close enough to 21x9). In the video/film realm we frame things in camera leveraging both aspect ratios for intended deliverables. Is there anyway to do this in the editor for the Game window rather than having to manually switch back and forth?

ie: set the game output for 21:9 in the editor, but then have an overlay that shows where the 16:9 frame would be cut off or cropped. Would make designing so much quicker.

A real world example… the monitor is 16x9 but you can see the visible crop to 21x9. Not necessarily interested in vertical the crop - don’t want to lose resolution + we don’t have to deal with CCD/CMOS sensor limitations - but having the guides would be extremely useful.

And a quick mockup…

It’s a good callout as a feature to help you nail this stuff down, but honestly it’s so easy to drop an extra overlay UI canvas in with the above matting, and you can even control it and add your own other features, such as a horizon line, etc.

ProTip: you can edit more than once scene at a time: open your main scene you are working on, THEN drag-open a second scene with a Canvas and UI to give you the above overlay masking.

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Cool I had no idea, thanks!!

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You’re welcome! If you really want to blow your mind, you can do this at runtime with additive scenes… check it:

Additive scene loading is one possible solution:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/820920/2
https://discussions.unity.com/t/820920/4

https://discussions.unity.com/t/824447/2

A multi-scene loader thingy:

https://pastebin.com/Vecczt5Q

My typical Scene Loader:

https://gist.github.com/kurtdekker/862da3bc22ee13aff61a7606ece6fdd3

Other notes on additive scene loading:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/805654/2

Timing of scene loading:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/813922/2

Also, if something exists only in one scene, DO NOT MAKE A PREFAB out of it. It’s a waste of time and needlessly splits your work between two files, the prefab and the scene, leading to many possible errors and edge cases.

Two similar examples of checking if everything is ready to go:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/840487/10

https://discussions.unity.com/t/851480/4

Apologies… reading your tutorials but I’m super confused by what I’m reading. I’m not really doing a GUI thing in my project, basically just trying to frame the final output for composition purposes. I’m completely not understanding.

Here’s my sample 21x9 transparent overlay with 16x9 inside - I’d like to frame with this:

or 32x9 (for one of those crazy 49" wide screen LCDs)

Or should I go with something like this? Both aspects next to each other… takes up a lot of editor real estate though.

Here’s a much better example of what I mean from one of the Resident Evil games:

You can see how the character is composed in the scene while still taking into account the wider aspect of the various displays. Is something like this doable?

edit: Another example

You can create custom overlays: Unity - Manual: Create your own overlay

Shouldn’t be too hard to wrangle this together yourself.