[UPDATE] The Community Shaders team has released another major feature for The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: skylighting. This feature has been under internal testing for a long time and is finally available to the public. According to the main author (ProfJack again), this might just be the most complex and transformative feature they've added to date. Skylighting is essentially sky-based large-scale ambient occlusion, improving realism and boosting contrast in areas that lack direct lighting. You can check out some examples below.
While this feature was already available for Skyrim via Boris Vorontsov's ENB, the CS team explained the two implementations are very different. ENB's is more taxing, enables skylighting only from one direction (unlike CS, which works from all directions), and also doesn't work at certain times during the day/night cycle, such as sunrise and sunset, when it is generally disabled to avoid shrouding everything in darkness.
ProfJack admits that there may be frametimes spikes with the current skylighting implementation in Community Shaders, though they're planning to improve this shortcoming in future updates.
There are also some side benefits through interactions with other Community Shaders features. For example, wetness effects won't apply to areas that are supposed to be dry because they are covered by structures, improving realism and potentially allowing for snow and/or frost effects in the future.
When combined with dynamic cubemaps, the feature ensures the sky is reflected only when it's supposed to.
Water reflections are also improved and get volumetric lighting, too.
Lastly, effects like smoke and fog are properly skylit, so they don't glow in the darkness anymore as they do in vanilla Skyrim.
Skylighting is recommended to be used in combination with Screen Space Global Illumination, which was introduced with CS 1.0 a few weeks ago, to get the optimal effect.
[ORIGINAL STORY] That Unreal Engine 5.5 recreation of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim we covered yesterday certainly looks cool, but it's not really practical. It's not optimized, for one thing, and it's also not really playable, being more of a proof-of-concept or a demo than anything else.
Thankfully, there are plenty of options for anyone actually interested in playing the game with modernized graphics. The Community Shaders graphics enhancement suite recently made big advancements, such as the introduction of Physically Based Rendering (PBR), and its development continues at an impressive pace.
The newest feature released yesterday is called Cloud Shadows. As you might easily guess, it adds dynamic cloud shadows to Skyrim. According to author ProfJack (the same who released Terrain Shadows), who worked on Cloud Shadows with main Community Shaders author doodlum, it's a custom technique where cloud shadows are aligned to the sun and use the game's built-in cloud system. The clouds are rendered from the player's perspective, with the texture itself rendered as a side effect of the cubemap reflection rendering. Because of this, there are no additional draw calls that the GPU has to deal with.
Cloud shadows are also used for volumetric lighting, so the sun's rays can be obscured. When clouds cover the ground, the player is shrouded in darkness. When the sun does pop between the clouds, though, the result can be striking, says ProfJack.
The Cloud Shadows CS feature is compatible with all weather mods, but it won't work perfectly with weather systems that 'fake' overcast clouds using the sky color. When it comes to Skyrim compatibility, this will work on all versions of the game: Special Edition, Anniversary Edition, and even on Skyrim VR. Based on what the author said, there shouldn't be any major performance drawbacks, which are always worth considering when adding a mod to the VR version.
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