it kinda works if I round the box’s edges and use a fresnel ramp as opacity, as the first vid posted by ClockworkOcean suggested, along with his method for the front fade.
if I could somehow alter the contrast of the fresnel ramp like I mentioned in my third post, so the round edge of the box which is closest to the camera doesn’t become less transparent than the rest, I guess it would work ok
it’s not ideal sure, a way to make a gradient opacity at the pixel edges of the mesh would be perfect, but idk how any of that would work