Thoughts on open world distance rendering and player constraints?

Graphics
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I’m wanting to set up a pseudo-open world sub-framework. I’ve learned about async loading and have it working to additively load scenes. I’m sort of welding ongoing projects together here.

My objective is a setup where I can make a continuous static world at my own pace in Blender and deliver it in segments, where the player is only constrained by natural geographic boundaries: cliffs, mountains, high walls, rivers, tree walls, “magic” shields, etc.

First thought is a solid, opaque fog wall around the player.

I’ve been tweaking the stock Unity global fog and it’s not designed for this. You can get close by setting the clear flag to a solid color matching the fog. Any shader resource examples for depth buffer based fog?

The other thought is to take the entire world and bake distant skyboxes for each area, I’m gonna start experimenting with this. Would I do this in Unity or Blender?

It’s gonna be an adventure and a pretty long project.

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I’m thinking as a beginner what I need to do is make my own skybox with a color gradient. Then match the bottom of the color gradient (I guess the zenith?) to the default fog color so the objects appear mostly invisible while %100 fogged.

I’ll post some screenshots later. I found a shader that fades to a skybox cubemap, which is cool. My main interest was making “solid” fog wall using the depth buffer render texture, but I was having difficulty figuring out how to do that and also have some kind of “background.” I guess at the end of the day the two ideas are fairly incompatible.

Getting a good looking horizon wasn’t a challenge I expected!