I managed to create the illusion of my 2D sprite interacting within the 3D space using 3 layers. Bottom layer contains the floor, and any 3D assets behind my player, as well as an object to control the players movement and variables that doesn’t need to be visibly rendered to serve its purpose. Middle layer contains my player sprite, pinned to the center of the camera and draped over my player controller like a ghost costume or a warhammer minifig sitting on its base. The top layer contains a camera with the exact same angle settings as the bottom layer so that 3d objects can be shifted back and forth between the two layers based on their position relative to the player controller, with this layer containing everything that the player needs to be able to go behind.
The Vid:
and the Events:
It’s not a perfect or elegant solution, but it works about as well as y-sort did when I was building everything without the 3D elements, and more importantly it allows me to proceed with implementing gameplay without bouncing back and forth between two potential versions of the game. As you can see in the video, it works best with smaller objects, so I’ll just have to design my maps with that in mind.