I am working on a game that simulates day and night. I would like to have the sun slowly rise over the background behind the trees and shine through also. Has anybody seen anything impressive? Or have any ideas?
My trees look like this:
At the moment this is just 1 object that is tiled in the background but I am working on breaking it up into seperate objects.
Depends how you go about moving the background around, because it's difficult to capture that kind of effect from directly behind tree's, you always have to be sort of at an angle of the tree so you can the shadow in the air behind it. That's really what it is, is a shadow of the tree's casting on the thick air, usually fog, behind the tree's. And if you're in the shadow, it's hard to see it.
At the moment the background is just made up of a bunch of different trees on different layers parallaxing in a "i'm deep in the woods" kind of way. But I am happy to change anything to get the effect in the picture you posted.
It's tricky and I probably wont be able to give you the best solution.
If I was desperate to get that kind of effect in MMF2 though, given I don't know much knowledge of fancy extensions to give you special effects besides lens effects - my idea would be a few blurry layers that parallax past each other. Unless you worked on where the light was vs where your backdrops are though, it probably couldn't easily be dynamic.
I kind of left MMF2 behind in favor of Unity though (which has a single option for adding sun rays), so this is all kind of speculation anymore. I really hope someone else might be able to help you more, now that we have a clear idea of what you're looking for.
I reckon the solution is to create a whole bunch of separate alpha channel objects that rotate and resize depending on your position relevant to them. Is there a shader effect that could blur the image below the rays?