Adding a single colored 2d panel in a 3d game

Questions & Answers
1

So, here is what I want to achieve:

There are a couple of players, and each of them should have a name, an icon and some other information following the players model as a name tag.
The name tag shall have a single colored background, that can be easily changed via script and should be resizable depending on the length of the players name.
The name tag should be a child of the 3d model of the player.

Here’s what I tried:

UI Panel - this has pretty much everything I need, but it can only be rendered on a Canvas. Since each tag should be a child of the player, this would mean a canvas for each player and I think that there are some major performance drawbacks if I do this.

Sprite with white image - works good, but you can’t resize it properly. You can scale it, but this distorts all child elements like text, icons, etc

Plane - pretty much the same as the Sprite solution, and it feels… “dirty”. This probably isn’t what these planes are for.

My Question:
Is there a simple way to add a 2d object with a recttransform component, that is completly filled with a single color, no matter how you resize it? Basically just like a UI panel that works outside of a canvas.

Thank you for your time.

Jonas

2

Did you try the world space canvas? You can do the “parenting” by a simple script which adjusts the world position of the panels to the player positions with some offset. This way you would have only 1 canvas.

3

“I think that there are some major performance drawbacks if I do this” → What makes you think this? Have you tried profiling? If you’ve only got a couple of players there really should be no problem here - I have 30+ canvases in a scene with no performance hit (just remember to disable the graphic raycaster component if you don’t need it)