How to make far away areas shaded?

Help Shaders
,
1

Godot Version

v4.4.1.stable.mono.official [49a5bc7b6]

Question

So, I have a forest scene with directional light. Naturally, everything should be shaded because of the tree canopy blocking the sun. And, well, it is. But at some distance shadows stop rendering, which causes this sort of illusion, where there are seemingly clearances all around you that you can never reach.

I tried increasing the Max Distance on the directional light, but it does not work the way I expect it to and even introduces some weird artifacts. Frankly, even if it did work, it would be pretty bad for the performance and really just unnecessary, because all I’m looking for is to simply make far areas shaded by default.

I tried using black depth fog, but it has to be really dark for the desired effect and I don’t want it to stand out as much. Also, it makes SkyBox dark (which could be fixed by setting Sky Affect to zero, but then the lower part of SkyBox becomes visible and non-affected by fog as well).

I just feel like there must be a simple way of achieving the effect I’m looking for. But even if there is no simple way, there should be at least some way… right?

2

Maybe you could shade a shadow color with things far in the depth buffer using the compositor system. Im not aure how different that is from a depth fog.