¶ Overview
Community Shaders feature which adds optimised parallax with shadows, and Complex Materials support.
¶ Features
¶ Parallax
Parallax mapping adds depth to flat surfaces to simulate greater detail.
Skyrim supports parallax; however, the vanilla shaders are broken. The SSE Parallax Shader Fix fixes it, but objects are still noticeably flat.
This effect adds a highly optimised version of parallax mapping, called Contact Refinement Parallax Mapping. This means that performance and quality is significantly improved compared to traditional parallax occlusion and steep parallax mapping techniques.
Preview: The new technique compared to the original Parallax Occlusion Mapping patch (modern GPU). This is a 0.22 milliseconds performance hit, and a 6% fps hit in this instance compared to vanilla.
Disclaimer: The above benchmark was with a significantly older version of CS.
Terrain Parallax requires all landscape textures are made to support parallax. Vanilla Complex Parallax - Landscapes is a great option!
Community Shaders includes significant performance improvements for terrain rendering to offset the performance cost.
Parallax mapping is bandwidth-bound. To improve performance you can recompress parallax textures to BC4.
¶ Parallax Shadows
All parallax materials include support for approximate soft shadows. This is an extremely cheap effect which applies to all directional and point lights.
¶ Complex Material
Complex Material / parallax ENB guide | Modding.wiki
Includes support for the Complex Material specification which makes use of the environment mask. This includes parallax, as well as more realistic metals and specular reflections.
Complex Material support is based on the nexus guide which includes a specification for the technique. It may not be identical to ones used in other shader mods.
This includes support for Majestic Landscapes, Majestic Mountains Complex Material, and Parallax Spell Impacts.
May lead to some warped textures on modded content which have an invalid alpha channel in their environment mask, e.g. the Durzog in Immersive Creatures.
Does not support skin shaders as no mod uses this feature.
Community Shaders includes a bug fix to support this effect.
¶ Requirements
- Community Shaders
- Supported materials patched with PGPatcher
¶ Contributors
- aers for the original parallax fix and SSE Engine Fixes.
- shadowking97 for the original shader this mod was based on.
- jeromeJrm for their Complex Material guide.
- Ent for answering my questions about terrain parallax.
- Pfuscher for answering my questions about Complex Material.
- MJP for extremely useful optimisation tips and links.
- thyrn for optimisation help.
- The Community Shaders discord for extensively testing and offering feedback during development.
- VishVadeva for benchmarking.
- RealExist
- davo
- hakasapl for Terrain Helper support
¶ References
- https://github.com/tgjones/slimshader-cpp/blob/master/src/Shaders/Sdk/Direct3D11/DetailTessellation11/POM.hlsl
- https://github.com/alandtse/SSEShaderTools/blob/main/shaders_vr/ParallaxEffect.h
- ParallaxOcclusionMapping.fx from the DirectX SDK
- Review of Displacement Mapping Techniques and Optimization
- Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag - Road to next-gen graphics
- A new approach for Parallax Mapping: presenting the Contact Refinement Parallax Mapping Technique
- Practical Parallax Occlusion Mapping For Highly Detailed Surface Rendering
- Quadtree Displacement Mapping with Height Blending
¶ Additional Media
