¶ Welcome to the Community Shaders Features Guide
Welcome to the official Community Shaders User Wiki.
This page outlines all the features currently available in Community Shaders.
This wiki is powered by the Nexus Mods documentation system and maintained by the community.
For more advanced information, see the GitHub Developer Wiki.
Need help or want to chat with the community? Join us on Discord:
¶ Core Features
¶ A core feature is included with a base install of Community Shaders.
Cloud Shadows: Dynamic cloud shadow casting across the landscape
CS Editor: Custom real-time weather & imagespace editor for all mod-making needs
Dynamic Cubemaps: Real-time reflection mapping for enhanced environmental reflections
Extended Materials: Terrain and object parallax and other advanced effects. Requires supported textures and mesh patching
Extended Translucency: Enhanced translucent material rendering
Grass Collision: Realistic grass interaction and collision detection
Grass Lighting: Improved lighting calculation for vegetation. Some features require a supported grass mod
Image Based Lighting: Replaces the game's ambient lighting with physically-based IBL derived from cubemap spherical harmonics
Interior Sun: Advanced shadow casting in interior spaces that changes with time of day. Requires a supported lighting mod
Inverse Square Lighting: Physically accurate light falloff calculation. Requires a supported lighting mod
Light Limit Fix: Removes engine limitations on dynamic light sources, allowing more than 4 lights in view. Shadow casting limit is unchanged
LOD Blending: Fine-tuned control over lighting characteristics of LOD objects and terrain
NRD: NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers integration for denoising, used by SSGI, SSR, etc.
Performance Overlay: Real-time monitoring of frame rates, draw calls and performance metrics
Remote Control: Exposes developer tools to an external devbench for AI-assisted development
RenderDoc: RenderDoc capture support to aid development
Scene Manager: Applies selected CS settings by interior, time of day, weather, and location
Screen Space Shadows: Enhanced shadow rendering in screen space
Screenshot: Capture screenshots with HDR capabilities without stalling the game
Sky Sync: Realistic sun and moon movement through the sky
Subsurface Scattering: Realistic light penetration through translucent materials, used on skin
Terrain Shadows: Enables rough terrain shadows with infinite distance, in game and on world maps
True PBR: Support for Physically Based Rendering. Requires supported textures and mesh patching
Unified Water: Extends real water tiles into the LOD, eliminating water LOD seams and improving shading in the LOD
Vanilla Fresnel: Add realistic environmental reflections to non-PBR materials
Volumetric Lighting: Dynamic volumetric lighting effects
Volumetric Shadows: Downsampled VSM shadow maps for use by effects like particles and decals
Water Effects: Water parallax and caustics. Parallax requires a supported water mod
¶ Additional Features
¶ These features are not included in the base Community Shaders installation and must be downloaded separately. Click each feature name for downloads and detailed information.
Advanced Skin [TBA]: Enhances character skin rendering with multiple techniques
Effects 11: Support for unencrypted ENB presets through FX11 framework
Exponential Height Fog: Adds a realistic fog effect that increases in density with height
Grass Optimizations: Rewrites grass rendering around GPU-driven culling and instancing
Hair Specular: Enhanced hair rendering with realistic specular highlights
HDR Display: Native HDR output for supported displays
Horizon Fix: Improves the look of the horizon
Linear Lighting [TBA]: Linear Lighting does internal color space conversion to improve lighting calculation accuracy
Order Independent Transparency: Correctly blends overlapping transparent surfaces
Post Processing [TBA]: Advanced image effects and enhancements to improve the visual quality of the game, successor to Effects 11
Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI): Real-time indirect lighting simulation
Screen Space Reflections [TBA]: Hierarchical screen-space specular reflections
Skylighting: Simulates large scale world-space ambient occlusion
Snow Deformation [TBA]: Snow can be visibly compressed by actors moving through it, leaving lasting trails
Terrain Blending: Blends the terrain into terrain meshes
Terrain Helper: Allows additional texture layers for non-PBR landscape mods, to allow better optimised maps
Terrain Variation: Breaks up vanilla terrain tiling issues without any quality degradation
Upscaling: Adds DLSS 4.5/FSR 3.1 upscaling and FSR 3.1 frame generation
Wetness Effects: Dynamic surface wetness and rain interaction, custom rain ripples
¶ Contributing
See something missing that you would want to create? Join us on Discord and GitHub to get involved!
Get involved via the GitHub Repository and Discord Server.