Workarounds for many individual objects?

[sebasvideo]

I'm using one of Andrew's sample cities to have a camera travel around and there's bright text sitting on top of many buildings. In this composition Andrew used 3 groups for buildings, so I'm left with 2 I already used, so then I have to start using Element in other layers, which brings me to the problem of After Effect's fake 3D, or 2.5D as some call it.

There will be several pieces of text scattered across different buildings in the city, all on top of buildings, but since the camera is traveling through different places some of that text is going to be behind a building at points, so with the text layer being above the city layer, the only way I can think of is to keyframe an inverse mask for the text layer that will prevent the text from showing in front of the building. This is obviously a tedius task, is there any known workaround to accomplish the same?

Thanks,

Sebastian

[Eyalster]

Here is an idea.
You can make the different city groups (lets say 3) on 3 different layers with e3d.
in each layer you would still have 4 groups to place your text in, so in each e3d layer you would have 1 group of building array, and 4 groups of text that will be place on the top of the buildings from group 1.

now arrange your city in 3 layers.

the lower e3d layer will be the far buildings, the middle will be the center buildings and the top e3d layer will be the close buildings.

that should work

[sebasvideo]

Thanks, I will give it a try tomorrow.