Tricky resolution question

Unity Engine
1

Greetings all,
I have a tricky question regarding output resolution. I work at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Our museum features a huge 3-story projection system called the Daily Planet. It’s a great system, and content looks amazing on it–very sharp and clean.

Here’s my issue: the Daily Planet supports a mode called “Event”. In this mode, a standard HD movie (1920x1080) can be made to run full-screen on the Daily Planet screen at 1920x1905. So if I’m making a pre-rendered movie, I can set it up via After Effects or similar and make my movie at 1920 x 1905. I can then crunch the movie to 1920 x 1080 when I render it. Then when i set it up on the Daily Planet in “Event” mode, it will automatically unfold to the full size of 1920 x1905. There is of course some slight loss of quality, but it looks quite good.

My question: how can I replicate this trick with Unity? I’ve tried several experiments with the Edit>Project Settings>Player and with the Build settings, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful. I’d really appreciate any input you might have with this–it’s going to be a very big deal once we get it going. Thanks !

2

You could set your camera to render to a texture instead of to the screen,
and then re-render that texture to the screen, just as a single stretched polygon.
That way you can stretch the aspect ratio however you want :slight_smile:

3

JonnyHilly,
Thanks for the quick, informative response–sounds like something to try. I’m not a programmer, and don’t know much about that side of things. Can you point me at more info on “render to texture”, or suggest a link? No worries if not–I’m off to google it now. Cheers!

4

select the camera in your scene, and in the property window you’ll see some options… one of them you can set the render target to render to texture… and assign it a texture to render to.

you can calso find info in the Unity docs, ref manual and scripting manual,
go to the top of this page and click support->documentation

or also just search this forum :slight_smile:

5

Cheers!

6

you’ll probably want 2 cameras actually, one that renders to a texture, and the other (main) camera pointign at a plane (that you put your texture onto)

7

If the native resolution of the daily planet is 1920x1905 then why not render in that? Then there would be no quality loss due to rescaling.