Kappa Shader

Kappa Shader
Project Page	https://rre36.com/kappa-shader
Latest Version	3.1
Last Updated	2021-02-14
Visual Style	Realistic
Performance Cost	High
License	[{{{LicenseURL}}} {{{LicenseType}}}]

The Kappa Shader is the high-end shaderpack in my lineup and tries to deliver the most appealing results without resorting to complex techniques like voxelisation. It is generally considered a realistic shaderpack, although it takes its own shortcuts and liberties due to which it is by no means accurate in the sense of exactly recreating real life lighting configurations.

Key Features

Kappa Shader is known for its advanced and fairly unique Volumetric Clouds, which have been a cornerstone of its atmospherics and outdoor-visuals for a couple major versions now.

Version 3.0 introduced Screenspace Path Tracing (SSPT), which is also being used for light emission to allow for a wider variety of lighting colors within the screenspace limitations.

Settings Documentation

These are the available settings of this shaderpack. They are ordered by (sub-)screen as they are accessable ingame. This list is only accomodating the latest release, with eventual overlaps with older versions.

Atmosphere

Settings that control the visual appearance of atmospheric effects, which includes atmosphere properties, clouds and water.

Rainbows	Allows you to enable or disable the appearance of rainbows after rainy weather. Comes at virtually no performance cost.
Sun Path Angle	This setting allows you to control the rotation angle of the sun over the course of the day. Greater values allow you to mimic the sun angles of places that are further away from the equator.
World Time Animation	This option makes atmospherics be animated using the world time. This applies to clouds, fog and water and allows you to get the same visual results across multiple players on a server for example. Comes at no performance cost.
Air Coefficients
Rayleigh Color and Density Controls	These settings control the tint and overall density of molecules causing rayleigh scattering to happen (the thing that makes the sky blue and the sun red at sunrise/-set in laymans terms). Changing the tint allows you to simulate a different kind of atmosphere with a different response to sunlight.
Mie Color and Density Controls	These controls allow you change the tint and intensity of mie scattering, which is caused by molecules that are large enough to scatter light virtually identical regardless of its wavelength.
Ozone Color and Density Controls	These settings let you control the tint and intensity of light absorption caused by ozone in the air. Higher intensities can also be helpful to achieve more vibrant sunrises and -sets.
Mist Color and Density Controls	These settings allow you to tint and scale the volumetric mist you can observe at sunrise and night.
Clouds
Target Resolution	This controls the resolution the clouds are internally being rendered in (when using temporal upscaling, this is the resolution the clouds get temporally upscaled to before being scaled to the screen). Directly affects performance cost of clouds, which means that higher values are more expensive to run.
Temporal Upscaling	This allows you to enable Temporal Checkerboard Upscaling on the clouds, which vastly improves their performance at the cost of a minor loss of visual fidelity.
Cloud Reflections	This allows you to enable or disable the rendering of clouds in reflections. Comes at a small performance cost.
Cloud Shadows	This enables the clouds to cast shadows onto terrain and fog, leading to much more authentic and atmospheric lighting. Comes at a moderate performance cost.

• Air - fog and mist settings
• Clouds - settings for both volumetric (cumulus type) clouds and cirrus clouds. Volumetric clouds are part of the signature look of Kappa shaders, though they do come with some performance load
• Dimensions - adjusts Nether and End atmosphere
• Sky - minor settings for sky light transmission and scattering
• Water - to adjust water volume, waves and color
• Sun angle - use the slider to adjust the sun angle [but when and how?]
• Rainbows
• World Time Volumes

Lighting - adjusts properties of light and shadow

• Shadows - consider reducing shadowmap resolution to increase FPS at little visual cost
• Effects - settings for the Screen Space Ray Tracing (SSRT) [more investigation needed to determine settings with biggest impact on visuals and frame performance]
• Lights - adjust the strength and color of main light sources. Moonlight in Kappa is brighter than vanilla Minecraft, to make night-time in the outdoor over-world closer to the look of original Minecraft reduce Moonlight Multi to 0.5 or lower.
• Cave-Lightleak Workaround - can help to eliminate light leaking artefacts in caves [to do: write a note on loading adjacent chunks]
• Directional Lightmap - when 'On' makes Normal textures look more detailed, with light picking out surface detail at the cost of some performance. This effect works better with higher-end resource packs.
• Minimum Ambient Light - effects exposure in dark spaces. Reducing the value makes shadows and dark spaces darker (arguably more natural and closer to vanilla). Increasing the values bestows better night vision.

Terrain - an important setting for changing how solid surfaces are rendered

• Reflections - settings for how reflections are handled [ relevant always or only when SSRT ON? What is BRDF? What are the key options here? I tend to just leave as default]
• Parallax Occlusion Mapping - enabling POM enables 3D textures, a significant visual upgrade on specific objects close to the player with resource packs that support it.
• Normalmap Support
• Format
• Vertex Attribute Fix - may need to enable if POM creates glitchy artefacts
• Wetness mode
• Wind Effects - disabling stops the grass and the leaves waving in the breeze
• Intensity - determines the strength of the waving in the wind effect

Camera - settings for how the virtual camera sees the Kappa Shaders world

• Sensor Width
• F-Stops - only relevant when Depth of Field (DoF) is enabled. Lower values give a narrow/short focus range which makes the image focus at one depth at the centre of the screen, and blurry nearer and further from the player. Higher values give a longer focus range, so that more of the image is clearly in focus at one time.
• Anamorph Stretch Ratio
• Bloom
• Depth of Field - enable to create photographic bokeh focus effects. [Arguably better for screenshots than for gameplay?]
• Exposure - settings for adjusting the auto-exposure of the Kappa camera
• Lens Flare - enabling Lens Flare and Halo replicates the effect you get from pointing a real glass lens at a strong light source, for example the sun
• Motionblur - 'On' smooths/blurs the transitions between frames and is good for users with lower FPS. 'Off' may be better for higher FPS
• Vignette - 'On' makes the edges of the screen a bit darker replicating how older cameras captured light.

Post

Misc

System Requirements

Minimum
CPU	Allocated Memory	Graphics Card	Recommended Resolution	Operating System
AMD FX 4000 Series or Intel Core i3 3000 Series	2GB	AMD RX 460 or nVidia GeForce GTX 760	1280x720	Windows or Linux
Recommended for Medium Settings
CPU	Allocated Memory	Graphics Card	Recommended Resolution	Operating System
AMD Ryzen 1000 Series or Intel Core i5 4000 Series	4GB	AMD RX 480 or nVidia GeForce GTX 1060	1920x1080	Windows or Linux
Recommended for High Settings
CPU	Allocated Memory	Graphics Card	Recommended Resolution	Operating System
AMD Ryzen 1000 Series or Intel Core i5 4000 Series	4GB	AMD RX Vega 56 or nVidia GeForce GTX 1070	1920x1080	Windows or Linux

The Default settings are equivalent to High.

Mesa 20 drivers or newer are recommended for AMD configurations using Linux. Intel Graphics are not guaranteed to be compatible.