AuroraRT

# AuroraRT Shaderpack ## Short Summary **AuroraRT** is a premium, next-generation visual overhaul for Minecraft, built to deliver a distinct, atmospheric polar aesthetic and cinematic rendering quality. Modified from Complementary Shaders under the terms of the Complementary License Agreement 1.6, AuroraRT replaces standard environments with a curated visual identity featuring analytical sky scattering, dynamic aurora borealis, view-space raymarched reflections with advanced temporal denoising, physically based depth-of-field, and a fully calibrated ACES filmic color pipeline. Designed for Minecraft 1.21+ running Iris and Sodium, AuroraRT blends visual grandeur with robust performance profiles. --- ## Detailed Description ### Polar & Cosmic Skies AuroraRT features a bespoke atmospheric system that shifts away from default color maps to establish a majestic, cool-toned environment: - **Analytical Rayleigh & Mie Scattering**: A procedural sky dome calculating Rayleigh molecular scattering alongside a Henyey-Greenstein Mie phase function $P_{HG}$ for realistic solar halos that respond dynamically to atmospheric moisture. - **Ozone Twilight Sky Layers (Chappuis Absorption)**: Simulates sunlight absorption through the upper ozone layer using a wavelength-specific extinction coefficient. During sunsets and sunrises, this creates a beautiful pink-to-rose twilight arch fading into a deep teal zenith. - **Dynamic Aurora Borealis**: Multi-colored auroral curtains (flowing from neon green and teal to cosmic magenta) project vertically into the night sky, animated with a stable curl noise warp and a slow, majestic drift. - **Cosmic Parallax Nebulae & Twinkling Stars**: Procedural, multi-layer gaseous nebulae drift across independent parallax matrices. Stars are rendered as crisp, circular pinpricks of light rather than square blocks, twinkling with independent three-channel color offsets. ### Volumetric Atmospherics - **Exponential Height Fog**: Implements an analytical integral of exponential density over the view ray. Fog gathers realistically in low-lying valleys and thins out naturally as you ascend, shifting colors dynamically across biomes (such as a dusty gold in deserts, grey-blue in the Pale Garden, and cyan-white on snowy peaks). Fog density scales down on clear nights to open up the stars. - **Beer-Powder Volumetric Clouds**: Fluffy, self-shadowing volumetric clouds calculated using a Beer-Powder multiple-scattering model. This creates highly detailed cloud volumes with bright silver linings around the sun or moon, free of high-frequency coordinates warping. - **Nether Biome Storms**: Volumetric dust and fog colors transition dynamically based on your coordinates in the Nether (deep crimson in Crimson Forests, turquoise-teal in Warped Forests, ghostly blue-cyan in Soul Sand Valleys, and ashy purple-grey in Basalt Deltas). - **End Black Hole & Accretion Disk**: Renders a gravitational lensing effect around the sun/moon vector in the End dimension, distorting surrounding ender stars and cosmic nebulae around a rotating accretion disk and photon ring. ### Materials & Physics - **Next-Generation Water Shader**: A fully analytic procedural surface — five large directional wavetrains (wavelengths of roughly 4 to 19 blocks) summed into a rolling swell, with the surface normal taken directly from the analytic height gradient. Because there is no high-frequency normal-texture detail, the surface stays smooth at every scale and is free of the sub-pixel specular shimmer/grain that plagues texture-sampled water; additional distance- and grazing-angle flattening resolves far water into a clean mirror. Deep water uses spectral Beer-Lambert absorption to fade from pale teal shorelines into rich indigo depths, adds volumetric in-scattering so the water column reads as a lit medium rather than a darkening filter, and uses a physically based Schlick fresnel (water IOR 1.33). Surfaces feature sun specular glints derived from the wave gradient, backlit wave-crest subsurface scattering, and dynamic foam on both shorelines and wave crests. The underwater environment adds physically modeled single-scattering volumetric light shafts that dynamically match biome-specific water colors, animated seafloor caustics, a seamless horizon transition (eliminating artificial vertical borders), real-time transmission of the sun, moon, and sky dome through the water surface based on depth, and depth-limited volumetric god rays with dynamic 3D current noise simulating floating organic particles. - **Snow, Sand & Ice Realism**: Snow blocks, sand blocks, and snowy world overlays implement a physically based subsurface scattering model (`subsurfaceMode = 4`) that softens normal shading contrast and adds a backlit glow. High-frequency procedural micro-crystal normal maps cover snow surfaces, embedded with twinkling sparkles that modulate slowly over a 23-bit integer bitmask hash. Ice and snow sparkles are softened and fade over distance to ensure a smooth, noise-free appearance. - **Iridescent Translucents**: Clear glass features fresnel opacity and subtle iridescence, while stained glass blocks exhibit high backlit saturation and iridescence. - **Nether Portal Vortex**: Transformed with a noise-warped vortex spiral, 3D parallax sparkles, calibrated emission levels to prevent overexposure, and full block shadow voxelization. - **Integrated PBR (IntegratedPBR+)**: Enabled by default, offering auto-generated normal maps (bump-mapping) and coated textures (dust details) across default blocks without requiring external PBR resource packs. ### Lighting & Path Tracing - **Software Path Tracing Engine**: A physically rigorous, real-time software path tracer calculated dynamically over the voxelized landscape using cosine-weighted hemisphere sampling and ray-marched secondary bounce evaluation. - **Voxel Global Illumination (Voxel GI)**: Adds real-time diffuse indirect lighting (GI) and ambient occlusion (voxel AO) generated dynamically from the voxelized scene, calculating bounce transfer from glowing blocks and sky illumination onto surrounding surfaces. - **Jitter-Rotated Shadows with Uniform Vogel Disk Sampling**: Shadow maps are sampled using a mat2 rotation matrix driven by Interleaved Gradient Noise. PCF samples are distributed via a uniform Vogel disk distribution (`pow(r, 1.1)`) to minimize subpixel temporal dither noise. It features slope-scaled and distance-scaled PCF filtering offsets to dynamically smooth out low-resolution shadow map pixels at grazing angles and in the distance, backed by a slope-scaled shadow bias to completely eliminate shadow acne without peter-panning. - **Warm Cozy Blocklight**: Torch and blocklight emissions are shifted to a warm peach/golden amber, contrasting beautifully against cool night atmospheres. - **Volumetric Godrays**: Volumetric light shafts are shaped using a forward-scattering Henyey-Greenstein phase function. At night, light shafts are dynamically colored by the aurora borealis, streaming green, teal, and magenta rays down onto the landscape. - **Advanced Color Tracing (ACT)**: Voxel-based floodfill lighting enables colored blocklight emissions (such as colored candle lighting) and light-leaking corrections in caves. ### Reflections - **World-Space Player Reflections (WSR)**: Captures the player's vertex coordinates and UVs in the shadow pass, storing them in a layout-conformed SSBO (`playerVerticesSSBO`) and caching the player's skin into a dedicated atlas image (`playerAtlas_img`). This allows the ray-tracing pass to intersect and shade the player model dynamically in reflective surfaces (water, metals, ice). - **View-Space Raymarched Reflections (SSR)**: Employs perspective-correct 3D raymarching in view space with binary step refinement, preventing the geometric stretching and distortion artifacts typical of 2D screen-space raymarching. - **Ray Reconstruction (Denoising)**: Reprojects reflections temporally with an 86% history retention and strict depth/normal validation. Banding is smoothed out by an edge-preserving bilateral spatial filter that scales with the quadratic power of roughness, early-outing on perfect mirror surfaces to conserve GPU bandwidth. - **Roughness-Jittered Glossy Reflections**: Perturbs reflection vectors inside a roughness-scaled cone using a spatio-temporal dither, resolving into glossy reflections on rough metals, wet blocks, and glazed terracotta. ### Post-Processing & Camera - **ACES Filmic Tonemapping**: Selectable alongside Lottes, Krzysztof Narkowicz's ACES curve fit provides a punchy, high-contrast cinematic film response. It is integrated with a dynamic contrast slider and targeted saturation/vibrance boosts to preserve color richness. - **Dreamy Ambient Bloom**: Bloom weights are shifted towards large-scale blur tiles (LOD 4 to 8) while suppressing sharp highlights, wrapping torches, lava, and glowing ores in a soft, dreamy mist. - **Cinematic Depth of Field (DOF)**: Simulates physical lens optics in linear space. Foreground objects blur rapidly (macro focus) while background blur is capped to preserve scene context. Blur samples are distributed using a dither-rotated Fibonacci spiral (up to 64 samples) with settings for polygonal aperture blades (5 to 8 blades), anamorphic squeeze, cat's eye lens vignetting, specular highlight boosts, and depth-aware silhouette bleed prevention. - **Cinematic Photo Mode**: A dedicated toggle that disables TAA subpixel jitter and history blending to completely eliminate ghosting and motion blur during high-resolution screenshot capture. It automatically hides block selection outlines, leashes, and debug lines, forcing max DOF quality (64 samples) and silhouette bleed prevention. --- ## Performance & Customization Profiles AuroraRT provides 9 pre-configured quality profiles tailored for different hardware setups, allowing players to scale rendering features from maximum performance to fully path-traced realism. ### The 9 Profiles at a Glance 1. **Potato**: Maximum performance optimization. Disables shadows, voxel blocklighting, and block reflections while maintaining the core polar/cosmic color palette. 2. **Very Low**: Introduces low-resolution real-time shadows at a 4-chunk rendering distance, with basic water reflections. 3. **Low**: Scales real-time shadows to a 6-chunk distance, upgrades water reflections to screenspace raymarching (Medium), and enables basic block specular highlights. 4. **Medium**: Extends shadow distance to 8 chunks, enables Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), and introduces low-quality volumetric light shafts. 5. **High (Default)**: The standard intended experience. Features medium shadow quality over 10 chunks, high-quality PBR block reflections, 8-chunk voxel blocklight (Advanced Color Tracing), volumetric clouds, and entity shadows. 6. **Very High**: Upgrades shadow distance to 12 chunks, switches detail/cloud quality to High, enables 8x anisotropic texture filtering, and retains 8-chunk voxel blocklight. 7. **Ultra**: The highest standard preset. Delivers high-quality shadows over 16 chunks, 16-chunk voxel blocklight, 8x anisotropic filtering, and enables full World-Space Reflections (WSR). 8. **Cinematic**: The ultimate visual experience, designed for high-end GPUs or high-resolution screenshot captures. Maxes out shadow distance to a massive 32 chunks, voxel blocklight to 32 chunks, anisotropic filtering to 16x, shadow casting to Full block-entities, and elevates SSAO to High. 9. **Path Traced**: Enables the full real-time software path tracer (cosine-weighted hemisphere sampling with secondary bounces) on top of Voxel GI/AO, 16-chunk colored voxel blocklight, hybrid World-Space + Screen-Space Reflections (WSR+SSR), and world-space player reflections. Shadows and detail match Ultra (high-quality shadows over 16 chunks, 16x anisotropic filtering). Aimed at high-end GPUs and screenshot capture. ### Configuration Reference Matrix | Feature | Potato | Very Low | Low | Medium | High (Default) | Very High | Ultra | Cinematic | Path Traced | | :--- | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | | **Real-Time Shadows** | OFF | Very Low | Very Low | Low | Medium | Medium | High | High | High | | **Shadow Distance** | 2 Chunks | 4 Chunks | 6 Chunks | 8 Chunks | 10 Chunks | 12 Chunks | 16 Chunks | 32 Chunks | 16 Chunks | | **Water Reflections** | Potato | Low | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | | **Block Reflections** | OFF | OFF | Low | Low | High | High | High | High | High | | **Volumetric Light Shafts** | OFF | OFF | OFF | Low | Medium | Medium | High | Very High | High | | **SSAO Quality** | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | High | Medium | | **Temporal AA (TAA)** | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | | **Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)** | OFF | OFF | OFF | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | ON | | **Detail Quality** | Potato | Potato | Medium | Medium | Medium | High | High | High | High | | **Cloud Quality** | Low | Low | Medium | Medium | Medium | High | High | High | High | | **Texture Filtering (AF)** | OFF | OFF | OFF | 4x | 8x | 8x | 16x | 16x | 16x | | **Advanced Color Tracing** | OFF | OFF | OFF | 4 Chunks | 8 Chunks | 8 Chunks | 16 Chunks | 32 Chunks | 16 Chunks | | **Voxel GI / AO** | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | ON | ON | ON | | **World-Space Reflections**| OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | ON | ON | ON | | **Software Path Tracing** | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | ON | | **Entity Shadows** | OFF | OFF | OFF | OFF | Regular | Regular | Regular | Full | Regular | ### Custom AuroraRT Settings Screen The shader options menu is completely reorganized and custom-labeled in the Iris configuration GUI to provide a bespoke user experience: - **§ePerformance Tuning§r**: Manage pre-configured presets (Potato to Ultra) and toggle specific performance-scaling options. - **§bCinematic & Camera§r**: Configure ACES Filmic vs. Lottes tone curves, dynamic bloom, TAA filters, and physical Depth of Field options. - **§dShadows & Ambient Lighting§r**: Tweak PCF filter offsets, slope-scaled biases, warm amber blocklight, and ambient light cycles. - **§cAurora Skies & Atmospherics§r**: Tweak dynamic auroral curtains, star scintillation, cosmic nebulae, height fog, and storm limits. - **§aPBR & Surface Materials§r**: Configure Integrated PBR+ bump-mapping, procedural water waves, and sparkling snow/ice crystals. - **§7Extra Features§r**: Toggle block outline styles, moon phase lighting influences, hand swaying, and debug variables. --- ## Technical Compatibility & Exclusions ### Supported Specifications - **Minecraft Version**: 1.21+ (and compatible newer versions). - **Required Mod Loaders**: Iris Shaders and Sodium (Fabric/Quilt). - **Hardware**: Compatible with modern NVIDIA GeForce, AMD Radeon, and Intel Arc GPUs. ### Verified Exclusions & Unsupported Features To ensure complete transparency and prevent configuration issues, the following systems are **explicitly unsupported or excluded**: - **Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing (Vulkanite / Dirt RT)**: AuroraRT is an OpenGL-based shaderpack and does not support hardware-accelerated Vulkan path-tracing pipelines. - **Vanilla Core Shaders (VPT-1.3.0)**: Vanilla core shaders are disabled by Iris when a shaderpack is active, making VPT integrations incompatible. - **VTXS Screen-Space Traversal**: Hierarchical Hi-Z bitmask raymarching is not included due to copyright restrictions. - **Contact-Hardening PCSS Shadows**: Temporarily disabled due to stepping artifacts under shadow map resolution limits. - **Screen-Space Lens Raindrops**: Removed from post-processing to maintain high performance and clear viewports. - **Apple Silicon M-Series ACT**: Advanced Color Tracing (voxel lighting) is disabled on Apple GPUs due to driver limitations regarding vertex shader image writes. - **OptiFine ACT / Reflection Resolution**: Voxel colored lighting is disabled on OptiFine due to lack of image/SSBO support. Dynamic reflection resolution requires Iris 1.7+ and will display an error message on OptiFine. --- ## Legal Credits AuroraRT is distributed as a Modified Pack under Section 1.3 of the **Complementary License Agreement 1.6** (included as `License.txt` within the shader pack). - **Original Pack**: Complementary Shaders by Complementary Development. - **Official Complementary Site**: [https://www.complementary.dev](https://www.complementary.dev)