URP - Achieving depth of field in 2D

Hello,

My 2D game contains five layers of backgrounds, each placed apart by 20 on the Z-axis. I have a parallax effect applied on the layers and this works perfectly.

I am attempting to blur the three most back layers in order to create a depth of field attempt, so far I have tried to create various gaussian blur shaders in order to do this, Youtube 'Unity 2D blur' and I have attempted every tutorial available only to realise this isn't viable.

I have also tried several several assets on the Unity asset store and depth of field post-processing effect, none of this has worked.

I am close to giving up, something that seems simple enough has really been a struggle for me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Hi.

Why didn't depth of field post-processing work for you?

 

If these background layers are never in focus, it'll be more performant to not use a shader and instead blur the texture itself in Photoshop/Gimp/etc.This would allow you to blur it perfectly.

However, he's a very simple shader based technique.

If that doesn't work what is going wrong?

 

I'm jumping in
Thanks for the link !

However this doesnt look like gaussian blur in any way :/
I highly doubt that background can look good with this approach...

 

Does blurring the texture itself work? Or is there some other consideration preventing that for your use case?

 

Hello

I have no idea, tried every which way to implement it following almost all tutorials I could find online and unfortunately nothing worked for me.

 

Hi there, tried this tutorial and did not create the desired effect, blurring in photoshop/gimp is my last resort as I don't want multiple versions of the same sprite as I would like to use the sprites on different layers and therefore would need to have various versions of the sprite blurred at different levels. Thanks for the help though! Much appreciated.

 

I have worked out a way to blur the material on the sprite which almost works however it is no longer effect by light

 

You could try using low-res images - for example 4x blur of a 512x512 image just make it 128x128 and set to bilinear in the import settings. This also has the benefit of smaller file sizes and faster loading.

 

How? Ive been searching and testing for several hour to try to have a DoF in my 2D game.