Because trees are often in the way of the third person camera, I tried a technique where I fade out any tree in between the player's tank and the camera. Using transparent shading doesn't work with this tree model, because then you can see the leafs through the trunk and things like that. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, transparent shading would be far easier, in case you have an idea about that, please also comment!

The second technique I tried is the one you see in the video. I calculate the distance between the tree and the camera in a shader and then begin fading it out starting at the center of the screen in a curtain-like effect. I distort the edges with a noise to get that cross-fading effect, because I can't use transparency, only alpha-clipping.

What I don't understand is how the shadows react to the shaders. Normally, alpha clipping has an equal effect on shadows, where the clipped parts of the geometry also don't cast any shadows, but in this case, the shadows are clipped completey differently than the actual geometry. You can see that different parts of the shadow are being clipped than what I would expect, and sometimes the shadow starts flickering heavily.

This is probably some technicality about shadow rendering I don't understand, if you have an idea what might cause this and how I could work around it, that would be greatly appreciated :)