You can now donate if you want to help fund development of Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders. If I get enough money from donations I can buy graphics cards that people are having troubles with and do trial and error fixes with them so that more people can enjoy this awesome mod! http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/940974-123sonic-ethers-unbelievable-shaders-glsl-shaders-dynamic-shadows-more/
I’ve decided that putting gpu power towards approximating indirect lighting not limited by screen space would be a better idea than spending processing on variable penumbra shadows. The performance hit is about the same. I also feel that it removes the need for SSAO.
The method is quite simple, blend a normal shadow map with a very very blurred version of the same shadow map and some great area light/indirect lighting effects are achieved. Even the leaves in trees have a radiosity/sub-surface scattering appearance to them.
The goal of this lighting change is a more realistic appearance in Minecraft’s lighting on small and large scales. Note the beautiful effect it has on this great Mirror’s Edge map that I found via google. Whoever built that is brilliant, by the way.
With a little more adjusting I’ll probably release this version as an experimental set of shaders that people can use/test.
I’m not sure if anyone noticed the variable penumbra shadows in the screenshots I posted a little while ago, here’s a nice example of them in action. The player is much closer to the ground than the other objects casting shadows, thus the other shadows around the player are blurry and the player’s shadow is sharp. You can test these out for yourself by downloading the Ultra shaders in my thread. The shaders in that download link use translation to do blurring, this screenshots uses 14 random noise textures for the scattering and averages them, so there’s slight graininess, but I feel that this is a less severe side effect than the banding that translation caused. It also runs a bit faster this way, so I think I’ll be updating the download link with this new version.
This is very exciting for me because the only other game I can think of that has variable penumbra shadows is Crysis 2. I still can’t believe my idea of how to do this actually worked.
v05 is out now!! Go get it here!!
Optimizations for v05. Reverted back to sharp unfiltered shadows to improve performance. Attempts to fix dark interiors made as well.
More SSGI goodness! I found a nice way to blend the light so that it looks like it’s actually illuminating other surfaces and not just coloring them. I’ve also optimized the code enough to where I might include this in the next version. I think it’s looking quite good!
Progress on my SSGI shader. Not sure if I’ll actually include it in the next release. This mod is already laggy, it doesn’t need to be weighed down more. The fact that Crysis 2 runs better on my PC than Minecraft is a big problem :P
I’m working on a screen-space indirect lighting/global illumination shader. It’s still very rough but this is what I’ve come up with so far.
I might include this in the next version if it improves more.
Some screenshots of the next version coming up.
I tinted the sunlight orange-ish and the ambient light blue to more accurately simulate outdoor lighting. Also just rearranged the way SSAO is rendered so it doesn’t get rendered on top of motion blur.
Also experimenting with some color bleeding effects to integrate into the SSAO shader. I might post some screenshots if I make any good progress.
Those links to the 1.1 update totally had the wrong files in them. I’ve fixed it now. Run over to my thread and re-download. Sorry about that!! My brain must be fried from all of the GLSL programming…..
