# God Rays Effect
The God Rays effect adds shimmering god rays to the image which are emitted from bright spots and can also be masked to ensure only light sources emit them.
TIP
This effect can be heavy on performance and you may want to consider adding a user property to allow users to turn this off.
# Effect Settings
Cast type: The radial cast type will create rays in a circular fashion, centered around a specific point that you can change with the center option. The directional cast type will create rays that go into a fixed direction, that you can change with the direction option.
Quality: This allows you to configure how precise the rays will be. Higher values can have a severe impact on performance.
Kernel size: This allows you to configure how blurry the god rays will be. When less quality is used, you generally need more blur to hide artifacts.
Blend mode: This controls how god rays will be blended with the background image.
Noise: Enabling this option adds natural looking shimmer to the rays, it's highly recommended to keep this enabled in most cases to have the god rays animated.
Copy background: Enabling this option is useful for transparent images. If you apply the god rays to a transparent image or text, for example, they will blend incorrectly and you will get a poor result. Enable this option to improve blending over transparent pixels and fix that.
Opacity mask: You can paint this mask to limit casting of the god rays into a certain area, like the sky or sun.
Albedo: This texture will be scrolled to generate the noise animation.
Color: This allows you to change the color of the rays.
Blur scale: This allows you to further reduce or increase the blur that is applied to the god rays.
# Noise
- Noise amount: This option controls how much noise variance will be added to the rays.
- Noise scale: This allows you to change the size of the noise variance. A high scale will result in more rapid, flickering changes while a lower scale will make the noise appear more uniform.
- Noise smoothness: This allows you to control the smoothness of the noise texture.
- Noise speed: This option controls how rapidly the noise texture is scrolled and applied to the rays.
# Ray Casting
- Center: Only for radial casting. This changes the center from where the rays are emitted.
- Direction: Only for directional casting. This changes the direction of the rays.
- Ray threshold: This controls how bright the background image must be before rays are added to the image at any given point.
- Ray intensity: This allows you to change how bright rays will appear.
- Ray length: This allows you to adjust the length of the rays. Keep in mind that longer rays may produce artifacts and you may have to increase the quality option to get a nice looking effect.