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AuraLite Shaders

AuraLite Shaders

Shader

Lightweight, highly optimized OpenGL 4.6 shaders for Minecraft 1.20.1 featuring fly-through 3D volumetric clouds and LabPBR.

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AuraLite

AuraLite is a modern, lightweight, and highly optimized shader pack built on top of the OpenGL 4.6 / GLSL 460 standard. It is specifically designed and exclusively tested for Minecraft 1.20.1 with Sodium + Iris (and compatible with OptiFine 1.20.1).

AuraLite delivers a breathtaking, realistic visual experience without overcomplicating the screen with bloated post-processing effects (such as aggressive motion blur, heavy bloom, or screen-space reflections), ensuring maximum FPS and smooth frametimes on modern GPUs.

What's New in v0.2.2

Version 0.2.2 is a major lighting overhaul. The composite pass grew to ~922 lines of GLSL while keeping the same lightweight philosophy and FPS targets.

  • New [Sun & Moon] configuration screen — 4-step independent Sun & Moon intensity sliders (Dim → Blazing / Pitch Night → Full Night), Sun Color Temperature based on the scientific Tanner Helland blackbody curve, Moon Color Temperature (Icy Blue / Silver 4100K / Warm Cream), Sun Halo (Mie scatter) glow on terrain, and an Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow back-scatter pass.

  • Rotated Poisson Disk Soft Shadows — replaces the old fixed 3×3 PCF kernel. Three quality steps (Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft) on shadow maps up to 4096×4096.

  • Shadow Distance Control — cap dynamic shadow rendering at 60m / 80m / 120m / 160m for performance or quality tuning.

  • Shadow Tint — Neutral Gray / Cool Blue (physically realistic) / Warm — daytime shadows under an open sky.

  • Ambient Lift — Dark / Standard / Lifted — controls how dark shadowed areas appear at night and in caves.

  • Light Wrap (Terminator Softness) — Realistic Lambert / Soft / Stylized — softens the boundary between lit and shadowed faces.

  • All v0.2.0 content features (auroras, Milky Way, procedural stars, post-rain rainbow, POM, cozy lights, wet reflections, ground mist, cosmic Nether portal, ice glitch fix) remain fully present and are now intelligently distributed across the LOW / MED / HIGH / ULTRA quality profiles.

Features

Volumetric Clouds

AuraLite features a fully physical, flyable 3D cloud system driven by 10-step Raymarching in world coordinates:

  • True 3D Space: Clouds float at a physical height (Y-level 160m to 240m). You can fly up, enter a dense, foggy overcast, and rise above the clouds to see an endless rolling sea of fluffy cumulus clouds.

  • Beer's Law Self-Shadowing: Realistic light absorption makes cloud bottoms dense and dark while cloud tops glow with brilliant white/gold illumination.

  • Mie Scattering: Looking towards the sun produces a glowing golden halo around the cloud edges.

  • Overcast Storms: When raining (/weather rain), the fluffy cumulus clouds automatically expand, darken, and merge into an ominous, heavy Nimbostratus/Cumulonimbus storm deck. Shaders also distinguish full thunderstorms via the thunderStrength uniform, intensifying cloud darkness and wave chop accordingly.

Living Night Sky

The night sky is no longer just a static starfield — it's a fully procedural cosmos:

  • Aurora Borealis: Realistic, flowing northern lights that ripple across the upper sky. Modes: Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled, with independent speed and brightness controls.

  • Milky Way Nebula: A subtle diagonal brownish galactic band glows softly above the horizon, with adjustable brightness.

  • Procedural Stars: Independent brightness and density sliders let you choose between a few crisp pinpricks or a brilliantly dense Hubble-style sky. Stars sparkle and twinkle in real time.

  • Persistent Rainbow: After rain stops, a soft rainbow arcs across the sky and gently fades out as the wetness uniform decays. Brightness and saturation are configurable.

Kelvin Sunlight and Skies

  • Tanner Helland Blackbody Sun (v0.2.2): Sunlight color temperature is dynamically calculated in real time using a physically-correct blackbody Kelvin curve, with three selectable presets (Cool / Realistic / Warm Golden). Produces photorealistic sunrise/sunset colors (~1800K–2200K), warm golden hours (~2800K), and clean crisp white noon light (~5700K–5800K).

  • Beer-Lambert Atmospheric Extinction: Sunlight intensity dynamically drops as the sun approaches the horizon due to scattering in thick atmospheric masses:

    $airMass = \frac{1}{\sin(\alpha) + 0.15 \cdot (\alpha_{deg} + 3.885)^{-1.253}}$

    This yields incredibly soft, rich, and breathtaking sunset and sunrise golden hour transitions.

  • Independent Sun & Moon Intensity (v0.2.2): 4-step master sliders let you push the day brighter (Blazing) or sink nights into total darkness (Pitch Night).

  • Moon Color Temperature (v0.2.2): choose between Icy Blue (cold), Silver (physically accurate 4100K), or Warm Cream (harvest-moon).

  • Sun Halo (Mie forward-scatter) & Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow (v0.2.2): warm scattering effects on terrain when looking near the low sun.

  • Crispy Circular Sun & Moon Disks: Custom procedural, perfectly round, anti-aliased sun and moon disks are drawn onto the sky dome with glowing coronas and soft halo scattering.

Lighting and Shadows

  • Rotated Poisson Disk Soft Shadows (v0.2.2): Three quality steps (Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft) deliver natural-looking penumbra on shadow maps up to 4096×4096. Replaces the older fixed 3×3 PCF kernel.

  • Shadow Distance Control (v0.2.2): 60m / 80m / 120m / 160m caps for tuning performance or quality.

  • Shadow Tint (v0.2.2): Neutral Gray / Cool Blue (realistic) / Warm — physically-accurate cool tint under an open daytime sky.

  • Ambient Lift (v0.2.2): Dark / Standard / Lifted — controls how dark shadowed areas appear at night and in caves.

  • Light Wrap / Terminator Softness (v0.2.2): Realistic Lambert / Soft / Stylized — smooths the boundary between lit and shadowed faces.

  • Deep Dark Nights: Night ambient light, moonlight intensity, and fog are reduced by 2× by default to create an incredibly atmospheric, immersive, and dark night. Caves and forests are pitch dark, requiring torches for exploration.

  • Warm Block Lights: Torches, lanterns, and lava emit a cozy golden-amber glow with physically accurate quadratic falloff.

  • Cozy Torch Flickering: Real-time flickering animations for torches, campfires, and lanterns add a living, warm atmosphere to your shelters. Held-item light contribution (heldBlockLightValue) is also accounted for.

Fresnel Water and Moon Reflections

  • Fresnel Effect: Water reflectivity is mathematically calculated based on your viewing angle. Looking straight down provides crystal transparency, while looking towards the horizon transitions water into a highly reflective, glossy sheet reflecting the sky dome.

  • Silver Moonlight Path: Moonlight specular reflection on water ripples has been increased by 4.5×. At midnight, a brilliant silver lunar reflection path shimmers across the waving ocean.

  • 3D Geometric Waves: Vertex shader waves physically displace the water mesh in real-time, and react to rainStrength / thunderStrength for choppier seas during storms.

  • Independent Ripple & Specular Controls: WATER_RIFFLES (Calm / Standard / Choppy) and WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH (Soft / Standard / Glinting) can be tuned separately for the perfect water mood.

  • Zero Feedback Glitches: Designed to be extremely stable, utilizing no feedback-loop depth buffer reads to guarantee bug-free solid rendering on all GPUs.

Dynamic Weather Surfaces

  • Wet Reflections: During rain, solid blocks like grass, dirt, and stone darken and become glossy, picking up sky reflections under open weather. Disables itself automatically under roofs.

  • Low Ground Mist (Y = 62–66): Soft, golden-white fog sheets drift across water and ice surfaces at dawn and dusk — perfect for cinematic sunrise screenshots.

Foliage Animations

  • Waving animations for oak/spruce/birch leaves, tall grass, flowers, vines, lily pads, and crops.

  • Gently animated using hardware-optimized sine waves and time constants.

  • Ice Fix: ice / packed ice / blue ice / frosted ice are tagged with a dedicated block ID (10005) to disable waving and refraction, eliminating long-standing visual glitches.

LabPBR Support and POM

  • 3D Normal Maps: Real-time TBN (Tangent-Binormal-Normal) matrices generate true three-dimensional depth on blocks (stone crevices, brick joints) reacting dynamically to light angles.

  • Specular Reflection (GGX Microfacet): Polished surfaces give sharp glossy glints, while metallic surfaces (gold, copper, iron) tint the specular reflection with the block's native albedo.

  • Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM): True per-pixel block relief that pops out of the surface. Configurable POM_DEPTH (1–3) and POM_STEPS (1–4). Disabled by default in LOW/MED/HIGH profiles; enabled in ULTRA. Recommended to keep off on incompatible resource packs.

  • Seamless Fallback: Falls back automatically to gorgeous flat vanilla textures if no PBR resource pack is active.

Cosmic Nether Portal

The vanilla Nether portal texture is procedurally transformed into a swirling 3D plasma vortex — animated purple/magenta cosmic energy that pulses with hypnotic depth. Mapped via dedicated block ID 10006 in block.properties.

Post-Processing

  • Multiple Tone Mapping Curves: Pick from Soft, Filmic (ACES), or Intense (High Contrast) to match your preferred mood. Industry-standard color grading prevents overexposure on bright blocks (sand, snow) while retaining rich shadow details.

  • Color Vibrancy: 4-step non-linear saturation control (Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid) that makes foliage glow emerald and skies look lush, without crushing skin tones.

  • Exposure Brightness: Muted / Balanced / Vibrant — global brightness lift.

  • Subtle Vignette: Gentle lens-darkening at screen edges for improved depth and immersion.

Cloud Altitudes

AuraLite's sky is meteorologically modeled after the international cloud classification system:

Altitude (m)

16 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ↑ Cumulonimbus (Cb)

12 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│

10 000   Ci  ─ Cirrus              │ Vertical

 8 000   Cc  ─ Cirrocumulus         │ Development

 6 000 ─ ─ Cs ─ Cirrostratus ─ ─ ─ ─│─ High Clouds

 5 000   Ac  ─ Altocumulus          │

 4 000   As  ─ Altostratus          │

 2 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│─ Mid Clouds

 1 500   Sc  ─ Stratocumulus        │

 1 000   St  ─ Stratus              │

 500     Ns  ─ Nimbostratus         │─ Low Clouds

   0 ─ ─ Cu ─ Cumulus ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│

AuraLite smoothly transitions these layers based on in-game weather conditions (clearing, rain, or storms).

Optimizations

AuraLite is built from the ground up for maximum FPS using OpenGL 4.6 native hardware operations:

  • Hardware FMA: All wave and waving foliage math is compiled into native single-cycle hardware operations (fma), reducing GPU execution cycles.

  • Bitwise Noise: Replacing slow transcendental float functions (fract(sin(dot(...)))) with ultra-fast Integer Bitwise PCG-style hashes utilizing floatBitsToUint and uintBitsToFloat.

  • Early-Ray Termination: Volumetric raymarching terminates instantly once cloud transmittance falls below 2%, saving rendering power.

  • No Hand Glitches: Handheld items, particles, and mobs are rendered in a separate stable path without tangent matrix overhead, eliminating "translucent hand" bugs.

  • Profile-Based Scaling: Every feature (POM, Auroras, Cozy Lights, Wet Reflections, Ground Mist, Shadow Distance, Sun Halo, etc.) is intelligently distributed across the LOW / MED / HIGH / ULTRA profiles so low-end systems don't pay for effects they can't afford.

Installation

  1. Download AuraLite_ShaderPack.zip from the Versions section on Modrinth or from the Releases section on GitHub.

  2. Open your Minecraft directory (e.g. %appdata%/.minecraft on Windows).

  3. Place the downloaded .zip file inside the shaderpacks folder (Do not unzip it!).

  4. Launch Minecraft 1.20.1 using a profile with Sodium + Iris or OptiFine installed.

  5. In-game, go to Options -> Video Settings -> Shader Packs, select AuraLite, and click Apply.

Configurations

AuraLite includes a fully translated Russian & English in-game configuration menu:

  • [Lighting Settings]

    • Dynamic Shadows: Toggle sun/moon shadows.

    • Shadow Resolution: [1024 / 2048 / 4096]

    • Shadow Softness (v0.2.2): [Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft] — rotated Poisson disk filtering.

    • Shadow Distance (v0.2.2): [Near 60m / Standard 80m / Far 120m / Ultra 160m]

    • Shadow Tint (v0.2.2): [Neutral Gray / Cool Blue / Warm]

    • Shadow Lift / Ambient (v0.2.2): [Dark / Standard / Lifted]

    • Light Wrap (v0.2.2): [Realistic Lambert / Soft / Stylized]

    • Torch Warmth: [Cozy / Warm / Intense] — Customize block light warmth.

    • Torch Flickering: Toggle real-time torch / campfire / lantern flicker.

    • PBR Lighting: Toggle PBR specular reflections and normal mapping.

    • 3D Block Relief (POM): Enable Parallax Occlusion Mapping (LabPBR resource pack required).

    • PBR Intensity: [Subtle / Standard / Mirror]

  • [Sun & Moon] (new screen in v0.2.2)

    • Sun Intensity: [Dim / Standard / Bright / Blazing]

    • Sun Color Temperature: [Cool / Realistic (Tanner Helland) / Warm Golden]

    • Sun Halo (Mie Scatter): Toggle warm forward-scatter halo on terrain.

    • Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow: Toggle stronger warm back-scatter at low sun angles.

    • Moon Intensity: [Pitch Night / Standard / Bright Moon / Full Night]

    • Moon Color Temperature: [Icy Blue / Silver 4100K / Warm Cream]

  • [Foliage Settings]

    • Waving Leaves: Toggle leaves animation.

    • Waving Foliage: Toggle grass, flowers, and crops animation.

    • Wind Speed: [Gentle / Breeze / Gale]

  • [Water Settings]

    • Water Waves: Toggle 3D vertex water waves.

    • Water Density: [Clear / Balanced / Deep] — Adjust water transparency.

    • Water Ripple Strength: [Calm / Standard / Choppy]

    • Water Specular Glow: [Soft / Standard / Glinting]

  • [Sky & Clouds]

    • Volumetric 3D Clouds: Toggle raymarched clouds.

    • Cloud Altitude: [Low (~110m) / Standard (~160m) / High (~240m)]

    • Cloud Thickness: [Thin (Cirrus) / Standard (Cumulus) / Dense (Stormy)]

    • Aurora Borealis: [Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled]

    • Aurora Speed: [Slow / Standard / Fast]

    • Aurora Brightness: [Soft / Standard / Glowing]

    • Milky Way Brightness: [Dim / Standard / Bright]

    • Stars Brightness: [Faint / Standard / Brilliant]

    • Stars Density: [Few / Standard / Dense]

    • Rainbow Intensity: [Subtle / Balanced / Vivid]

  • [Post-Processing & Fog]

    • Fog Density: [Low / Medium / High] — Adjust horizon mist.

    • Low Ground Mist: Toggle golden-white fog sheets at Y = 62–66 during dawn/dusk.

    • Exposure Brightness: [Muted / Balanced / Vibrant]

    • Color Vibrancy: [Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid]

    • Image Contrast: [Soft / Filmic ACES / Intense] — Tone mapping curve.

    • Vignette: Toggle cinematic corner darkening.

    • Rain Wetness Reflections (hidden): Wet glossy ground during rain (on by default in MED+).

Quality Profiles

Profile Shadows Shadow Dist. Softness Clouds PBR POM Cozy / Wet / Mist Sun Halo / Sunrise Aurora Tone Map
LOW Off — Sharp Off Off Off Off / Off / Off Off / Off Off Soft
MED 2048 80m Soft On On Off On / On / On On / On Cold biomes ACES
HIGH 4096 120m Soft On On Off On / On / On On / On Cold biomes ACES
ULTRA 4096 160m Ultra Soft On On On On / On / On On / On Always Intense

License

  • AuraLite is open-source and licensed under the MIT License.

  • Officially Supported Platform: Minecraft 1.20.1 with Sodium + Iris or OptiFine loader.

  • Note: Other Minecraft versions are not officially tested at this stage.

External resources

IssuesSource

Project members

AlexanderNyr

Member

Technical information

License
MIT
Project ID