Parallax Shaders - Terrain Mod

Parallax Shaders - Terrain

Parallax Shaders - Terrain is a set of replacement shaders for terrain that includes parallax occlusion mapping. Parallax mapping is a technique which creates an illusion of 3D from basic 2D textures, which improves the small scale detail of objects.

Acknowledgement

Thank you, Goshko, for motivating me to work on this with his absolutely stunning landscape texture pack - Sandstone Desert.

Description

Parallax Shaders - Terrain is a set of shaders which replace Vanilla Plus Terrain ones, adding parallax. What this means, in practice, is that your landscape will stop looking like a bunch of flat planes, but will have (fake) 3D detail. This only works with a suitable landscape texture pack that includes height data. The complete list of features:

1. adds parallax occlusion mapping to terrain,
2. distance based optimizations,
3. adds height based self-shadowing for further improving the 3D effect,
4. height based texture blending, improving the vanilla landscape texture blending considerably.

Note for Texture Artists

Parallax Shaders - Terrain expects the height map to be in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture of your terrain.

Technical Note

Depending on your GPU, this could be quite costly on your performance. As such, I recommend testing it for yourself and seeing how much it impacts you.

There are two things you can do if the performance hit is too much:

1. Use the optimized shaders uploaded separately as an optional file. The quality is a bit worse and the distance covered is shorter.
2. Downscale the terrain diffuse textures. Going from, for example, 2k to 1k resolution, can also noticeably boost the performance.

However, note that since the height is in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture, downscaling it can lead to the overall terrain looking a bit worse, especially if running the game at 4k.

Requirements

Parallax Shaders - Terrain requires the following:

1. Shader Loader - NVSE
2. LOD Flicker Fix - NVSE
3. Vanilla Plus Terrain
4. A suitable texture pack, such as Sandstone Desert or Tale of Two Landscapes

Installation

Install as normal. Load after LOD Flicker Fix - NVSE and Vanilla Plus Terrain.

Source Code

1. GitHub