Below are the shaders I tend to use and what I like or hate about each one. I can't use most shaders because of my video card.
Paolos Lagless
-awesome water
-good general lighting
-excellent sky
-no waving plants
-has a weird tendency to randomly make blocks in hand go all grey and texture-less
SonicEther Unbelievable
-super cool torch/fire/mob glow
-days are way too bright and nights/caves are way too dark
-water was nice from above but too dark from below
-aggressively waving plants
Sildur Basic
-very natural waving plants
-no interesting shadows or water
To keep it simple, no because the difference between shaders is what code the author wrote out.
A more complicated and true way of explaining, all shaders technically have stemmed from SEUS (Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders) as far as I know, but some are HEAVILY modified (Chocapics). Most of the shaders are modifications of Chocapics, and Chocapics is a fairly low-end shader that looks amazing and doesn't hurt FPS, but SEUS is another shader that still looks amazing, more so than Chocapics, but is very intensive graphically, so FPS will be cut in half at least on high-end systems. Why the difference? Chocapics are heavily modified to use more simple code that is less intensive to process. To combine SEUS and Chocapic would mean to basically butcher both packs to find out the exact differences and see if you can translate the code over to the other pack. You should look into packs such as KUDA / CUDA, they provide amazing visuals at 60FPS on my GT 840M, which the GT 840M is an entry-level gaming card.
If your system is not powerful enough to handle shaders, I'm afraid your best bet is simply to search for one that can both run great and look great on your system. Combining shader packs won't help in FPS, in fact if you use SEUS as a base and try to splice some other high-performance shader code, you will only harm your FPS as SEUS is designed to only be ran by high-performance setups.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Author of the Clarity, Serenity, Sapphire & Halcyon shader packs for Minecraft: Java Edition.
I found that I could easily add waving plants from one shader pack to another but the actual lighting was a no-go for the reasons you stated. I have a pretty good PC, it can run skyrim on max graphics just fine, but a lot of shader packs make my video drivers crash even though they are apparently up to date. I also have that stupid problem with the sims where it lags for no reason due to my graphics card being somehow just incompatible even though it's easily powerful enough.
since the waving plants can be swapped, are there any other files that can be? what do each of the sets of files in the shader packs even effect?
Also I tried the shaders you suggested and the only one that worked (as in, didn't crash my system) was KUDA. It looks pretty nice though so thanks for suggesting it!
I found that I could easily add waving plants from one shader pack to another but the actual lighting was a no-go for the reasons you stated. I have a pretty good PC, it can run skyrim on max graphics just fine, but a lot of shader packs make my video drivers crash even though they are apparently up to date. I also have that stupid problem with the sims where it lags for no reason due to my graphics card being somehow just incompatible even though it's easily powerful enough.
since the waving plants can be swapped, are there any other files that can be? what do each of the sets of files in the shader packs even effect?
Also I tried the shaders you suggested and the only one that worked (as in, didn't crash my system) was KUDA. It looks pretty nice though so thanks for suggesting it!
Simple effects like waving plants can be moved between shaders as it basically operates the same way, only difference being different values and slightly different code depending on the block and shader. Lighting on the other hand is per-shader, SEUS has a different lighting system to Chocapic that looks better, but is overall more intensive (especially if you're running 10.2, 10.2 has an effect known as Global Illumination which basically tries to emulate how in real life a single ray of light can bounce infinitely and carry the colour properties of a surface, see this for a comparison, the top is with Global Illumination, the bottom without), however Chocapics has a simpler lighting code, but is much less intensive.
KUDA / CUDA is the exact same as Chocapic but it has additional code and features. KUDA is less laggy as it has sacrificed some high-detail settings that the player doesn't exactly notice, such as shadow detail. In Minecraft shaders, shadows have advanced blurring enabled, so the "blocky" shadowing isn't as noticeable as in other games such as Skyrim, so KUDA turns down shadow resolution, from 2048 which I think SEUS 10.1 Standard has, to 512.
The main thing is Minecraft shaders are much more intensive than shaders present in standard games, Cody or Sonic Ether, the author of SEUS, if I remember correctly stated that SEUS 10.1 Standard is as intensive as Battlefield 4 at max settings. Simply because of how advanced the technology of SEUS is, especially the more recent versions. Might I ask, what graphics card do you have? And are you playing on a laptop? If you're playing on a laptop, make sure Minecraft is actually running on your dedicated graphics card and not the integrated one.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Author of the Clarity, Serenity, Sapphire & Halcyon shader packs for Minecraft: Java Edition.
I want to take the water from Builder's modded shaders and put it into silder's enhanced default. Is there a way just to put the water file into silder's?
Paolos Lagless
-awesome water
-good general lighting
-excellent sky
-no waving plants
-has a weird tendency to randomly make blocks in hand go all grey and texture-less
SonicEther Unbelievable
-super cool torch/fire/mob glow
-days are way too bright and nights/caves are way too dark
-water was nice from above but too dark from below
-aggressively waving plants
Sildur Basic
-very natural waving plants
-no interesting shadows or water
To keep it simple, no because the difference between shaders is what code the author wrote out.
A more complicated and true way of explaining, all shaders technically have stemmed from SEUS (Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders) as far as I know, but some are HEAVILY modified (Chocapics). Most of the shaders are modifications of Chocapics, and Chocapics is a fairly low-end shader that looks amazing and doesn't hurt FPS, but SEUS is another shader that still looks amazing, more so than Chocapics, but is very intensive graphically, so FPS will be cut in half at least on high-end systems. Why the difference? Chocapics are heavily modified to use more simple code that is less intensive to process. To combine SEUS and Chocapic would mean to basically butcher both packs to find out the exact differences and see if you can translate the code over to the other pack. You should look into packs such as KUDA / CUDA, they provide amazing visuals at 60FPS on my GT 840M, which the GT 840M is an entry-level gaming card.
If your system is not powerful enough to handle shaders, I'm afraid your best bet is simply to search for one that can both run great and look great on your system. Combining shader packs won't help in FPS, in fact if you use SEUS as a base and try to splice some other high-performance shader code, you will only harm your FPS as SEUS is designed to only be ran by high-performance setups.
Author of the Clarity, Serenity, Sapphire & Halcyon shader packs for Minecraft: Java Edition.
My Github page.
The entire Minecraft shader development community now has its own Discord server! Feel free to join and chat with all the developers!
since the waving plants can be swapped, are there any other files that can be? what do each of the sets of files in the shader packs even effect?
Also I tried the shaders you suggested and the only one that worked (as in, didn't crash my system) was KUDA. It looks pretty nice though so thanks for suggesting it!
Simple effects like waving plants can be moved between shaders as it basically operates the same way, only difference being different values and slightly different code depending on the block and shader. Lighting on the other hand is per-shader, SEUS has a different lighting system to Chocapic that looks better, but is overall more intensive (especially if you're running 10.2, 10.2 has an effect known as Global Illumination which basically tries to emulate how in real life a single ray of light can bounce infinitely and carry the colour properties of a surface, see this for a comparison, the top is with Global Illumination, the bottom without), however Chocapics has a simpler lighting code, but is much less intensive.
KUDA / CUDA is the exact same as Chocapic but it has additional code and features. KUDA is less laggy as it has sacrificed some high-detail settings that the player doesn't exactly notice, such as shadow detail. In Minecraft shaders, shadows have advanced blurring enabled, so the "blocky" shadowing isn't as noticeable as in other games such as Skyrim, so KUDA turns down shadow resolution, from 2048 which I think SEUS 10.1 Standard has, to 512.
The main thing is Minecraft shaders are much more intensive than shaders present in standard games, Cody or Sonic Ether, the author of SEUS, if I remember correctly stated that SEUS 10.1 Standard is as intensive as Battlefield 4 at max settings. Simply because of how advanced the technology of SEUS is, especially the more recent versions. Might I ask, what graphics card do you have? And are you playing on a laptop? If you're playing on a laptop, make sure Minecraft is actually running on your dedicated graphics card and not the integrated one.
Author of the Clarity, Serenity, Sapphire & Halcyon shader packs for Minecraft: Java Edition.
My Github page.
The entire Minecraft shader development community now has its own Discord server! Feel free to join and chat with all the developers!
I am trying to combine an "Only DoF" shader with an "Only Motion Blur" shader. Could anyone help me with that?
How do you even change/swap/mix the waving plants?? What's the file name?
gbuffers_terrain.vsh handles the waving for blocks you actually see on-screen, shadow.vsh handles the waving for the shadows that blocks project.
Author of the Clarity, Serenity, Sapphire & Halcyon shader packs for Minecraft: Java Edition.
My Github page.
The entire Minecraft shader development community now has its own Discord server! Feel free to join and chat with all the developers!
I want to take the water from Builder's modded shaders and put it into silder's enhanced default. Is there a way just to put the water file into silder's?