Rendering order in a 2.5D Game

Yimec

Hi everyone. I realise this is partly a Unity-specific problem, but after a lot of searching I haven’t found a solution, so I’m asking here.

I’m making a 2.5-D game. The player, enemies and some other elements are Spine skeletons, while many props and decorations are simple quads with sprite textures so they can sit in 3-D space and cast/receive shadows.

Here’s the issue: the main character’s skeleton is positioned so that Spine’s origin (0, 0) is at the feet, resting exactly on the Unity ground plane. When the character attacks toward the camera (facing “down” on screen), the sword-wielding arm dips below Spine’s 0, 0 because of the perspective tilt. In Unity this means the lower part of the sprite clips into the ground mesh and appears “cut off”.

What I need is a way to have the Spine character render just a little after the ground plane so the weapon and arm aren’t clipped, but still allow the character to go behind ground pieces that are actually higher than the feet (e.g. slopes, steps, raised platforms).

Thank you for your help, I hope you can help me finding a solution to this problem which is driving me crazy haha.

Spinebot

To address the issue of your Spine character's arm and weapon clipping into the ground mesh in a 2.5D game, you can consider a few approaches. One solution is to adjust the rendering order by manipulating the Z-position of the character or specific parts of the character, such as the arm or weapon, to ensure they render after the ground plane. This can be done programmatically by slightly adjusting the Z-position of the problematic parts during the animation where clipping occurs. Another approach is to use Unity's sorting layers or order in layer settings to control the rendering order, ensuring that the character's arm and weapon are rendered after the ground plane. Additionally, you can explore using shaders that handle depth sorting more effectively, allowing for better control over what renders in front or behind other objects.

Harald

@Yimec Theoretically you could also adjust (a copy of) the used shaders and add a z-bias to offset the mesh slightly. Likely this introduces undesired intersections with other parts however.

I'm not quite sure I understand your exact setup (camera, skeleton and Unity sprite angles) and what is actually intersecting, could you please show a screenshot which shows you issue, best including both Scene view and Game View?