What is Trace: An stylized shader aiming to achieve stunning visuals while trying to stay the most performant possible and survive in the process.
Some features:
- Outlines!: Depth based colored outlines
- Radiance Cascades based illumination: Novel realistic but performant true colored light from any light source
- Radiance Cascades Path Tracing: Same method around radiance cascades but a lot more accurate and a lot more heavy as well
- Realistic pixel-locked shadowmap: Sun light plus the rc based environment light shadowmap make for a set of real like interactive lights and shadows from any (modded too) light and shadow sources
- Ambient colors: per biome colored sky, water, and ambient effects
- Different cloud styles: Anime, Story mode, Vanilla.
- Different water styles: Pixel art, Anime, Realistic.Wakes: Pixel and Anime water style exclusive, adds a cool wake effect (better at pixel art water style)
- Bioluminescent water: at night, a neon cyan fog appears in water at a certain height
- Godrays: Screen based
- Post processing: Bloom, Vanilla AO, SMAA.
- And a lot more.
Also check built-in compat with:
The sun rotation and axis follows ecliptic seasons base seasonal system simulating real world seasons of the year for the sun and shadows position.
Some of these features wouldn't have been possible without the amazing effort and quality devs of other projects did, read the whole CREDITS.txt file if you are interested in all the works and how they amount to this Trace right now.
Trace also takes heavy inspiration from the stunning not publicly released yet CazToon shader!
Author's note: Overall this is a big update, it took a lot of effort and research into the already existing Trace pipelines, changes might not look as big as the previous update and if anything things will just look better because of the new tonemap but the actual amount of work and effort that went into this was really heavy, I plan on going still with the 2.2.0 update but the pace might slow down a bit the next months since I'm a bit overwhelmed by everything new and all the changes, still the shader is now in its best shape ever, hope you enjoy it!
You are allowed to include, modify or use Trace in any form and any type of project (just make sure to read the MLP 2.0 license, is very permisive even with other licenses like ARR, it adds some little clauses to make free the rc code)
