AeonRealism

Aeon Realism

Aeon Realism is a realistic and cinematic shader pack for Iris, focused on atmospheric lighting, detailed shadows, volumetric effects, and performance

«Look expensive, run cheap»

The shader uses temporal reprojection, TAA, screen-space techniques, and reduced-resolution rendering for selected effects to reduce GPU workload

✦ Lighting

• PCSS-style contact-softened shadows
• Dynamic lighting
• Ambient occlusion
• Screen-space global illumination
• Soft light scattering
• Colored shadows through certain transparent surfaces
• Separate day and night lighting
• Non-linear block light falloff
• Light contribution from emissive and handheld light sources

Daytime lighting uses a warmer appearance, while nighttime lighting is colder and less intense, with moonlight and ambient sky light providing most of the illumination

✦ Sky & Atmosphere

• Procedural atmospheric scattering
• Rayleigh and Mie scattering
• Atmospheric haze
• Procedural stars
• Separate sun and moon rendering
• Gradual sunrise and sunset transitions
• Adjustable cinematic color grading

The sun and moon are rendered as circular discs

The moon is slightly larger than the sun in a clear sky and supports adjustable lunar phases

✦ Clouds

Volumetric clouds with dynamic lighting and atmospheric interaction

Clouds interact with the sun and moon discs:

• Light can partially pass through thin cloud areas
• The sun and moon become dimmer when partially covered
• Partially covered discs become softer and less defined
• Denser cloud areas block more light
• Cloud density affects the lighting of the scene

Volumetric clouds are rendered at reduced resolution to help reduce GPU usage

✦ Volumetric Effects

• Volumetric fog
• Volumetric lighting
• God rays
• Light shafts through foliage
• Light shafts in caves
• Glow around bright light sources
• Underwater light shafts

Some volumetric effects use half-resolution or quarter-resolution rendering with temporal reprojection

✦ Water

Water uses a dedicated rendering system with several optical effects:

• Angle-based transparency
• Fresnel effect
• Screen-space refraction
• Depth-based light absorption
• Procedural waves
• Reflections
• Caustics
• Underwater fog
• Underwater light shafts
• Subtle underwater screen refraction

✦ Dimensions

Overworld

• Atmospheric distance haze
• Height-based fog
• Ground mist under selected weather conditions
• Soft sunlight
• Light shafts through trees
• Separate nighttime lighting

Nether

The Nether uses a dedicated atmospheric fog system

Fog color and density are influenced by the surrounding environment, allowing different Nether biomes to have different atmospheric appearances

• Volumetric haze
• Lava glow
• Light shafts
• Height-based fog gradient
• Different atmospheric settings for Crimson Forest, Warped Forest, Soul Sand Valley, and Basalt Deltas

The End

The End uses a dedicated sky and atmospheric system

• Dark space-like sky
• Procedural atmospheric haze
• Multiple parallax star layers
• Subtle End Stone glow
• Dedicated End Rod lighting
• Distance-based atmospheric haze

✦ Resource Pack Support

Supports LabPBR 1.3

The shader can use material properties including:

• Normals
• Ambient occlusion
• Smoothness
• F0 / metal information
• Porosity
• Subsurface scattering
• Emission

When a resource pack does not provide a required material map, the shader uses built-in fallback values

✦ Performance

Aeon Realism is designed with performance in mind, including on lower and mid-range GPUs

The rendering pipeline uses:

• Temporal anti-aliasing
• Temporal reprojection
• Stochastic sampling
• Dithering
• Half-resolution volumetrics
• Quarter-resolution rendering for selected effects
• Screen-space techniques
• Shared sampling between related effects
• Limited ray-marching step counts
• Individual quality controls for expensive effects

The shader does not use full path tracing or full-resolution ray tracing

✦ Presets

Preset| Description Potato| Lowest GPU usage, with volumetrics, clouds, and reflections disabled Low| Reduced quality with basic shadows and volumetric effects Medium| Recommended balance between visual quality and performance High| Higher shadow, GI, and reflection quality Ultra| Highest available quality with increased sample counts

Around 90 individual settings are available across 14 categories

The settings interface is available in English and Russian

✦ Technical Limitations

To accurately describe the current rendering system:

• GI, AO, and reflections use screen-space information and cannot account for geometry outside the screen
• Local light scattering in volumetric effects also has screen-space limitations
• The shadow projection is optimized around Iris's available shadow rendering and is not a traditional multi-cascade CSM
• Parallax occlusion mapping is not implemented
• TAA is an important part of the rendering pipeline and stabilizes several stochastic effects
• Disabling TAA can make some effects appear noisier
• Performance depends on resolution, GPU, render distance, Minecraft settings, and selected shader options

✦ Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.x
• Iris 1.7+
• OpenGL 3.3 Core or compatible hardware
• Up-to-date graphics drivers are recommended

OptiFine is not supported

✦ AI Disclosure

Parts of Aeon Realism were developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools

AI assistance was used during development for tasks including code generation and editing, troubleshooting, optimization, documentation, and development of selected technical components

The final implementation was assembled, reviewed, tested, and adjusted by the project author

Feel free to join our website: https://siba3090294-maker.github.io/EndExpanser/