Just confirmed that my trial Visual Studio Pro 2013 expired after 30 days but the 2013 Blend which is included as part of the download did not. So for those with no VS pro license the 2013 trial for win8 will get you a nice working XAML editor with Blend 2013 and no expiration.

Thanks for the detailed reply, if you could provide an example of the matrix approach I think it would be helpful to quite a few people since this requirement(character labels) is quite common.

Well it is not just occlusion but also problematic for scaling the size of the health bar and name. If the user zooms the camera in/out or the character walks into the distance the ui control is going to remain the same size and not scale with the character.

May have answered my own question but if you can confirm, it looks like the best approach might be to simply parent a billboard plane to the 3d objects(characters) and apply a RenderTexture to them. My only concern is this will result in a NoesisPanel per character, will this have any adverse effect...

I just downloaded Visual Studio Pro 2013 from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads

When it installs it loads "Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013" v12.0.4 as a standalone application with a license that expires in 0 days(assuming this means never expires?).

BTW found something interesting with Trial install of Visual Studio Pro 2013. Blend is installed via the 30 day trial but seems to have no expiration itself as it is a separate program. The license for Visual studio is 30 days only. I guess I will see at the end of 30 days if Blend also gets disable...

I'm trying to figure out the best way to assign name labels and healthbars to multiple 3d objects in my scene in conjunction with my fairly static 2d ui. Looking at the Primitives sample it looks like you are setting x and y position of the label manually every update, is this the most efficient or ...

Confirming this also crashes the Editor for me on Unity 4.2.2 on OSX

Ok but considering this is the very first simple control I am trying to use with Express it doesn't seem to bode well. If I go with a full version of Visual Studio I will not have these issues correct? If so I will probably just bite the bullet and get the full version.

Bear with me on some basic questions here as I work through the tutorials. I saw on the tools sticky that Visual Studio Express Blend should work for the most part however I ran into an issue trying the first part of the Unity Blend tutorial where you link to an existing item(Assets/NoesisGUI/Sample...