I'm looking to create an effect similar to the Photoshop "tilt-shift" blur in Illustrator. All the blur effects in Illustrator I could find only blur the whole element, without any "gradient" so to speak. Is it possible to achieve something like this in Illustrator? If so, will the paths of the object still be accessible?
I know I could potentially duplicate the text and put some alphamask gradient on the blurred element, but the effect is not quite the same.
Here's an image example of the effect, which I put together in Photshop. Photoshop requires to rasterize the image. This makes it kind of annoying to work with. Any help is greatly appreciated!