2D Character has no depth

Hello
I'm not a very experienced programmer and I'm stuck with a problem.

I'm developing a 3D game with 2D sprites, kinda like Paper Mario, and my character is being imported into Unity with the PSB Importer. The character is made of various sprites, has bones and it's animated using Unity's animator.

However it is being rendered weirdly and it always shows on top of other sprites, no matter how far it moves in the z axis.
Since I want the game to have other characters using the same sprite structure, I don't want them to overlap like that, so I want them to be rendered relative to their postion and not their layer hierarchy.
Any ideas?

 

Three (3) primary ways that Unity draws / stacks / sorts / layers / overlays stuff:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/orthographic-camera-rendering-order.1114078/#post-7167037

In short,

1. The default 3D Renderers draw stuff according to Z depth - distance from camera.

2. SpriteRenderers draw according to their Sorting Layer and Sorting Depth properties

3. UI Canvas Renderers draw in linear transform sequence, like a stack of papers

If you find that you need to mix and match items using these different ways of rendering, and have them appear in ways they are not initially designed for, you need to:

- identify what you are using
- search online for the combination of things you are doing and how to to achieve what you want.

There may be more than one solution to try.

Additional reading in the official docs:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/2DSorting.html

And SortingGroups can also be extremely helpful in certain circumstances:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-SortingGroup.html