Visibility control for Label3D based on camera facing

[nenad-jalsovec]

Would this make sense as a feature; Having visibility range for 3d labels, similar to distance visibility range with fading, but depending on camera facing (regardless of billboarding).

Here's my use case. I have a bunch of billboarded labels that mark stuff on the surface of a planet. There's no way to make them fade/disappear on the invisible side of the planet, other than to run a script on each of them. It'd be nice if they could be set to just fade out "automatically"

[Calinou]

Isn't this a matter of setting the Label3D's cull mode to Back, so that its backfaces are culled?

[nenad-jalsovec]

No, not really. If labels are billboarded then they'll never be face culled. I'm rather talking about orientation of their basis in respect to camera, not their faces.

Imagine a bunch of labels scattered on the surface of a sphere. All billboarded but each has -z (or y) basis aligned with the sphere normal. Handling it via depth buffer is not adequate as labels are typically overlaid and need to ignore depth test, and also cannot gradually fade that way.

[nenad-jalsovec]

For illustration, here's my actual use case. I'm talking about city name labels that fade and then vanish as they get closer to the horizon, i.e. they pass to the invisible side of the planet.

It's simple to do via script of course, but for a large number of labels I'd much rather not waste script time on this.

Not sure how common a need for this would be but still... putting it out here for discussion.