Shader Information - Despatra/Phoxel GitHub Wiki

Basic Information

This is essentially a more detailed explanation of the information found in "About" in the shader settings page

This is very outdated and unfinished, Imma fix that, promise.

Quality

• The shader profiles have been set such that you get a decent performance to quality ratio, but there are some other ways. One of the best alternatives is to increase your max framerate value found in the video settings to anywhere above 80. This way you can turn up Temporal Accumulation in the shader settings and get much less of a blur effect, I have found that if you can get your frame rate above 80 and set Temporal Accumulation to 2-4 that works pretty well.
• Setting Your Light Samples Variable in the Shader Settings to any multiple of 3 as of the most recent release of the shader will allow the it to clean up any explicitly traced lights by tracing to each one directly, rather than randomly sampling. This leads to nice even lighting for ELS.

Features

Visuals

Explicit Light Sampling (ELS)

Sampling certain light sources directly to greatly reduce noise

Global Illumination (GI)

Rays perform multiple bounces collecting light, creating accurate global illumination

World Space Reflections

Blocks outside of view can be traced and have their textures and materials sampled to create real reflections

Rayleigh Atmosphere Scattering

Pixelated Tracing

Path tracing can be pixel locked to create a more "Minecrafty" feel for those who like the look of it

Performance

DDA Based Voxel Tracing

A slightly faster version of voxel tracing to increase speed of intersections

Beam Optimization

Uses depth map to skip much of the first intersection math

Raster

Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM)

Textures are offset based on a height map to create the illusion of higher detail

Normal Mapping

Surface normals are offset based on a normal map to create the illusion of higher detail

Materials

Material textures are used to make objects have complex materials that interact with light differently

Camera

Brightness and Gamma control

Basic control of the "camera"

Debug

Debug View

Allows you to see exactly what the world looks like to the path tracing engine, which is a bit different than what you see