Effective use of the Blur effect - Requesting suggestions

My game is a top-down view of a circular environment with a center pillar...Basically, imagine a gladiator pit in the shape of a donut.

Using Z-elevation on multiple instances of the inner- and outer-ring wall objects, I've created a pseudo-3D arena effect. Works almost perfectly!

But to really drive effect home, I want to implement the blur effect that happens when objects in the distances or up close - whatever is not in the focus view (like how movies do for people in the distance or up close) - are blurred. The focus is primarily on the ground level. So that would mean that the closer you get to the camera (assuming it's waaaay up there above the arena) the more the top of the walls and pillar becomes blurred.

I tried using gradual intensity settings for each layer of the center pillar but the results weren't quite what I intended.

I was hoping for some suggestions on the settings I could use.

Thank you, kindly.

Sorry slightly offtopic, but that looks great! Hopefully you want to do a tutorial some day (in high concept form - to save time).

Good luck!

I was hoping to avoid having to use so many layers, but, ah well. Worth a shot. Thanks!

Sorry slightly offtopic, but that looks great! Hopefully you want to do a tutorial some day (in high concept form - to save time).

Good luck!

I appreciate that, very much! Thank you!

I don't think you need parallax if you're using z-elevation.

But I think the problem is that what you are describing (blurring the upper layers more than the lower objects) just isn't going to look good, or at least what I'm imagining.

My suggestion would be to not worry about blur at all (You've got an xy problem here). If you want to focus on the lower levels you can simply desaturate (or darken/lighten) the edge highlights as you go up in z-elevation. You can try opacity too, although I think that won't work very well either with stacked objects.

yeah I have no idea how the blur would look..

is there a reason you don't want to use more layers?? I don't think there's any kind of performance hit - maybe with the web effects.. but still it could be optimized.

jobel - I wanted to avoid using additional layers because, with z-el now a feature, it's unnecessary by-and-by. At least, if there's a better way to accomplish the visual effect I'm hoping to achieve. It's more details to manage and it can get rather cluttered in my mind.

oosyrag - Ah okay. I'll try those effects instead. Thanks!

Rhindon I don't think anything would ever make layers unnecessary, to my point you can add effects on different layers - for that alone would never stop anyone from using layers. Z elevation is only visual.