Position Text Mesh above parent transform in world space

Question

I'm making an isometric-ish 2d game in Unity. I want to display text above a sprite during certain conditions. For this, I'm using a TextMesh instantiated as a child of the sprite.

In local space, this obviously means that when I rotate a sprite, its children rotate along with it. From the player's perspective, the label now appears to the side of the sprite, rather than staying above it.

I can always calculate the world space position of the TextMesh during LateUpdate(), but a) that solution requires a designer to know that a script will alter the local transform, and b) things built into Unity have more eyeballs on them, so I'd rather use that.

Is there a mechanism built into Unity such that I can set a child's transform in the inspector to e.g. position.y = 0.4 and have it render 0.4 units above the parent in world space? Edit: Additionally, I want it to follow the parent as it moves, so just calculating once on Instantiate() isn't quite what I want either.

Answer 1

Create your own component to do this

Create a MonoBehaviour component script that exposes a public Vector3 that is then used to update the position of the object in WorldSpace instead of local.