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Aeon Realism
Aeon Realism is a realistic and cinematic shader pack for Iris, focused on atmospheric lighting, detailed shadows, volumetric effects, and performance
«Look expensive, run cheap»
The shader uses temporal reprojection, TAA, screen-space techniques, and reduced-resolution rendering for selected effects to reduce GPU workload
✦ Lighting
- PCSS-style contact-softened shadows
- Dynamic lighting
- Ambient occlusion
- Screen-space global illumination
- Soft light scattering
- Colored shadows through certain transparent surfaces
- Separate day and night lighting
- Non-linear block light falloff
- Light contribution from emissive and handheld light sources
Daytime lighting uses a warmer appearance, while nighttime lighting is colder and less intense, with moonlight and ambient sky light providing most of the illumination
✦ Sky & Atmosphere
- Procedural atmospheric scattering
- Rayleigh and Mie scattering
- Atmospheric haze
- Procedural stars
- Separate sun and moon rendering
- Gradual sunrise and sunset transitions
- Adjustable cinematic color grading
The sun and moon are rendered as circular discs
The moon is slightly larger than the sun in a clear sky and supports adjustable lunar phases
✦ Clouds
Volumetric clouds with dynamic lighting and atmospheric interaction
Clouds interact with the sun and moon discs:
- Light can partially pass through thin cloud areas
- The sun and moon become dimmer when partially covered
- Partially covered discs become softer and less defined
- Denser cloud areas block more light
- Cloud density affects the lighting of the scene
Volumetric clouds are rendered at reduced resolution to help reduce GPU usage
✦ Volumetric Effects
- Volumetric fog
- Volumetric lighting
- God rays
- Light shafts through foliage
- Light shafts in caves
- Glow around bright light sources
- Underwater light shafts
Some volumetric effects use half-resolution or quarter-resolution rendering with temporal reprojection
✦ Water
Water uses a dedicated rendering system with several optical effects:
- Angle-based transparency
- Fresnel effect
- Screen-space refraction
- Depth-based light absorption
- Procedural waves
- Reflections
- Caustics
- Underwater fog
- Underwater light shafts
- Subtle underwater screen refraction
✦ Dimensions
Overworld
- Atmospheric distance haze
- Height-based fog
- Ground mist under selected weather conditions
- Soft sunlight
- Light shafts through trees
- Separate nighttime lighting
Nether
The Nether uses a dedicated atmospheric fog system
Fog color and density are influenced by the surrounding environment, allowing different Nether biomes to have different atmospheric appearances
- Volumetric haze
- Lava glow
- Light shafts
- Height-based fog gradient
- Different atmospheric settings for Crimson Forest, Warped Forest, Soul Sand Valley, and Basalt Deltas
The End
The End uses a dedicated sky and atmospheric system
- Dark space-like sky
- Procedural atmospheric haze
- Multiple parallax star layers
- Subtle End Stone glow
- Dedicated End Rod lighting
- Distance-based atmospheric haze
✦ Resource Pack Support
Supports LabPBR 1.3
The shader can use material properties including:
- Normals
- Ambient occlusion
- Smoothness
- F0 / metal information
- Porosity
- Subsurface scattering
- Emission
When a resource pack does not provide a required material map, the shader uses built-in fallback values
✦ Performance
Aeon Realism is designed with performance in mind, including on lower and mid-range GPUs
The rendering pipeline uses:
- Temporal anti-aliasing
- Temporal reprojection
- Stochastic sampling
- Dithering
- Half-resolution volumetrics
- Quarter-resolution rendering for selected effects
- Screen-space techniques
- Shared sampling between related effects
- Limited ray-marching step counts
- Individual quality controls for expensive effects
The shader does not use full path tracing or full-resolution ray tracing
✦ Presets
Preset| Description Potato| Lowest GPU usage, with volumetrics, clouds, and reflections disabled Low| Reduced quality with basic shadows and volumetric effects Medium| Recommended balance between visual quality and performance High| Higher shadow, GI, and reflection quality Ultra| Highest available quality with increased sample counts
Around 90 individual settings are available across 14 categories
The settings interface is available in English and Russian
✦ Technical Limitations
To accurately describe the current rendering system:
- GI, AO, and reflections use screen-space information and cannot account for geometry outside the screen
- Local light scattering in volumetric effects also has screen-space limitations
- The shadow projection is optimized around Iris's available shadow rendering and is not a traditional multi-cascade CSM
- Parallax occlusion mapping is not implemented
- TAA is an important part of the rendering pipeline and stabilizes several stochastic effects
- Disabling TAA can make some effects appear noisier
- Performance depends on resolution, GPU, render distance, Minecraft settings, and selected shader options
✦ Requirements
- Minecraft 1.21.x
- Iris 1.7+
- OpenGL 3.3 Core or compatible hardware
- Up-to-date graphics drivers are recommended
OptiFine is not supported
✦ AI Disclosure
Parts of Aeon Realism were developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools
AI assistance was used during development for tasks including code generation and editing, troubleshooting, optimization, documentation, and development of selected technical components
The final implementation was assembled, reviewed, tested, and adjusted by the project author
Feel free to join our website: https://siba3090294-maker.github.io/EndExpanser/
All Versions
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[1.2] Living Weather & Light Update
by EndExpanser on Oct 16, 2026
Download
The Living Weather & Light Update transforms AeonRealism into a more responsive, atmospheric and physically grounded shader experience while remaining suitable for lower-end hardware.
Rain now changes the world dynamically without requiring shader reloads. Surfaces become wet, reflective and textured with animated droplets, expanding ripples and subtle wall runoff, then dry naturally when the weather clears. Rain streaks feature improved transparency, volume and lighting, while snowflakes receive soft atmospheric illumination and gentle brightness variation.
Lighting has been extensively reworked. Sunlight and shadows are softer, moonlight remains visible during storms, local lights create material-aware highlights, and nearby illuminated blocks transfer subtle colored light onto surrounding surfaces. Metals, polished blocks, natural stone and soil now have distinct reflection and roughness characteristics.
Volumetric clouds feature brighter crowns, shaded interiors and more defined billowing edges. Dense foliage receives subtle internal haze while retaining transparent texture cutouts. Underwater rendering now includes clearer water boundaries, improved surface transmission, enhanced caustics and visible underwater sun rays.
This update also fixes moving volumetric shadow trails, incorrect underwater terrain reflections, excessive wet-surface brightness and animated dark bands on vertical blocks.
Most improvements reuse existing buffers, temporal accumulation and analytical lighting approximations. Expensive effects scale with the selected quality profile, keeping the shader practical for integrated and entry-level GPUs.
Rain now changes the world dynamically without requiring shader reloads. Surfaces become wet, reflective and textured with animated droplets, expanding ripples and subtle wall runoff, then dry naturally when the weather clears. Rain streaks feature improved transparency, volume and lighting, while snowflakes receive soft atmospheric illumination and gentle brightness variation.
Lighting has been extensively reworked. Sunlight and shadows are softer, moonlight remains visible during storms, local lights create material-aware highlights, and nearby illuminated blocks transfer subtle colored light onto surrounding surfaces. Metals, polished blocks, natural stone and soil now have distinct reflection and roughness characteristics.
Volumetric clouds feature brighter crowns, shaded interiors and more defined billowing edges. Dense foliage receives subtle internal haze while retaining transparent texture cutouts. Underwater rendering now includes clearer water boundaries, improved surface transmission, enhanced caustics and visible underwater sun rays.
This update also fixes moving volumetric shadow trails, incorrect underwater terrain reflections, excessive wet-surface brightness and animated dark bands on vertical blocks.
Most improvements reuse existing buffers, temporal accumulation and analytical lighting approximations. Expensive effects scale with the selected quality profile, keeping the shader practical for integrated and entry-level GPUs.
[1.1] Rain & Fixing bugs
by EndExpanser on Oct 16, 2026
Download
new rain realistic system. new sky blue colour & new clouds. bugfixes.
[1.0] release version
by EndExpanser on Oct 16, 2026
Download
# Aeon Realism
A realistic, cinematic shader pack for **Iris** — built around one rule:
No path tracing. No full-resolution ray tracing. Every stochastic effect —
shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, reflections, volumetrics — is
deliberately under-sampled, dithered with a different pattern each frame, and
resolved by TAA. That is what lets the step counts stay low enough for a
GTX 1650 while the result still holds up in a screenshot.
## Lighting
from a real angular light size, so shadows sharpen at the point of contact and
spread out with distance the way they actually do.
## Sky and atmosphere
moonlight.
## Clouds and volumetrics
which is what stops the low-res buffer producing halos along geometry edges.
## Water
## Dimensions
own mood instead of one flat red. A height gradient keeps the sense of depth
through the murk.
stone with a faint glow of its own.
## Resource pack materials
ship a map, the shader falls back to its own block-id heuristics — vanilla and
PBR resource packs coexist in the same world.
## Presets
| Preset | For |
|---|---|
| **Potato** | Maximum framerate. 512 shadows, no volumetrics, no clouds, no reflections. |
| **Low** | Steady 60+ on weak hardware. 1024 shadows, quarter-res volumetrics. |
| **Medium** | Recommended. 1536 shadows with PCSS, half-res volumetrics with temporal reprojection, volumetric clouds, SSR, caustics. |
| **High** | 2048 shadows, screen-space GI, long SSR rays. |
| **Ultra** | 3072 shadows, maximum sample counts everywhere. |
Around 90 individual settings behind those, grouped into fourteen screens, with
English and Russian translations.
## Requirements
## Honest limitations
I would rather you know these up front than find them yourself.
is distorted so texel density follows an inverse-distance curve, with bias and
filter width tuned separately for three zones. The texel distribution is close
to a three-slice CSM. It is not a CSM.
off-screen term.
the cost this pack exists to avoid.
noisy. That is the trade the pack is built around.
## Русский
Реалистичный кинематографичный шейдерпак для **Iris**, собранный вокруг одного
правила: **выглядеть дорого, работать дёшево.**
Никакого path tracing и ray tracing в полном разрешении. Всё стохастическое —
тени, AO, глобальное освещение, отражения, волюметрика — намеренно
недосэмплировано, раздизерено разным паттерном каждый кадр и вычищается TAA.
Именно это позволяет держать низкие счётчики шагов на уровне GTX 1650.
Основное: контактные тени PCSS с настоящим угловым размером источника,
цветные тени сквозь витражи и воду, аналитическая атмосфера Рэлея-Ми,
тёплое солнце и холодная луна с фазовым терминатором, объёмные облака и
volumetric light в половинном разрешении с временной репроекцией, вода с
преломлением, поглощением и каустикой, отдельные настроения для биомов Незера
и процедурное небо Энда. Поддержан LabPBR 1.3.
Пять пресетов от Potato до Ultra, около 90 настроек на четырнадцати экранах,
интерфейс на русском и английском.
Ограничения честно перечислены в английской секции выше — если коротко:
каскады теней аналитические, а не настоящие; GI, AO и отражения экранные;
POM нет; без TAA будет шумно.
A realistic, cinematic shader pack for **Iris** — built around one rule:
- look expensive, run cheap.**
No path tracing. No full-resolution ray tracing. Every stochastic effect —
shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, reflections, volumetrics — is
deliberately under-sampled, dithered with a different pattern each frame, and
resolved by TAA. That is what lets the step counts stay low enough for a
GTX 1650 while the result still holds up in a screenshot.
## Lighting
- Contact-hardening shadows (PCSS).** A blocker search sets the penumbra
from a real angular light size, so shadows sharpen at the point of contact and
spread out with distance the way they actually do.
- Coloured shadows** through stained glass and water.
- Global illumination** — analytic sky and ground bounce weighted by the
- Ambient occlusion** sharing its sample positions and depth fetch with GI, so
- Subsurface scattering** — two lobes, so leaves glow when you look at a
- Block light remapped from Minecraft's linear ramp to an inverse-square
## Sky and atmosphere
- Analytic single-scattering Rayleigh/Mie atmosphere with an ozone layer and a
- Warm directional sunlight that shifts from amber at noon to deep orange at
- A large, warm moon with a real phase terminator, limb darkening and mare
moonlight.
- Procedural stars, and a lens flare that only appears when you actually look
## Clouds and volumetrics
- Raymarched volumetric clouds with a Beer-Powder light integral, rendered at
- Volumetric light** at half or quarter resolution with temporal
which is what stops the low-res buffer producing halos along geometry edges.
- God rays through forest canopies, shafts in caves, glow around lava, and
## Water
- Analytic wave height field — normals come from finite differences of the same
- Fresnel-driven transparency: see the bottom looking down, a mirror at a
- Screen-space refraction, Beer-Lambert absorption measured from the real water
- Underwater: wavelength-dependent extinction, light shafts through the
## Dimensions
- Overworld** — soft height fog, ground mist at dawn and in rain, aerial
- Nether** — volumetric haze with a palette derived from the game's own fog
own mood instead of one flat red. A height gradient keeps the sense of depth
through the murk.
- The End** — deep space sky, a procedural nebula built from two competing
stone with a faint glow of its own.
## Resource pack materials
- LabPBR 1.3** is supported: normals, AO, smoothness, F0 / metal index,
ship a map, the shader falls back to its own block-id heuristics — vanilla and
PBR resource packs coexist in the same world.
## Presets
| Preset | For |
|---|---|
| **Potato** | Maximum framerate. 512 shadows, no volumetrics, no clouds, no reflections. |
| **Low** | Steady 60+ on weak hardware. 1024 shadows, quarter-res volumetrics. |
| **Medium** | Recommended. 1536 shadows with PCSS, half-res volumetrics with temporal reprojection, volumetric clouds, SSR, caustics. |
| **High** | 2048 shadows, screen-space GI, long SSR rays. |
| **Ultra** | 3072 shadows, maximum sample counts everywhere. |
Around 90 individual settings behind those, grouped into fourteen screens, with
English and Russian translations.
## Requirements
- Iris 1.7+**, Minecraft **1.21.x** (developed and tested on 1.21.10)
- OpenGL 3.3 core
- Not compatible with OptiFine — the pack uses Iris-specific features
RENDERTARGETS, per-buffer blend control, dimension folders).## Honest limitations
I would rather you know these up front than find them yourself.
- The shadow "cascades" are analytic, not real cascades.** Iris gives one
is distorted so texel density follows an inverse-distance curve, with bias and
filter width tuned separately for three zones. The texel distribution is close
to a three-slice CSM. It is not a CSM.
- GI, AO and reflections are screen space.** What is not on screen does not
off-screen term.
- Local light scattering in the volumetrics is screen space too.** Lava you
- No parallax occlusion mapping.** The LabPBR height channel is decoded and
the cost this pack exists to avoid.
- TAA is not cosmetic here, it is the denoiser for the whole pipeline.**
noisy. That is the trade the pack is built around.
## Русский
Реалистичный кинематографичный шейдерпак для **Iris**, собранный вокруг одного
правила: **выглядеть дорого, работать дёшево.**
Никакого path tracing и ray tracing в полном разрешении. Всё стохастическое —
тени, AO, глобальное освещение, отражения, волюметрика — намеренно
недосэмплировано, раздизерено разным паттерном каждый кадр и вычищается TAA.
Именно это позволяет держать низкие счётчики шагов на уровне GTX 1650.
Основное: контактные тени PCSS с настоящим угловым размером источника,
цветные тени сквозь витражи и воду, аналитическая атмосфера Рэлея-Ми,
тёплое солнце и холодная луна с фазовым терминатором, объёмные облака и
volumetric light в половинном разрешении с временной репроекцией, вода с
преломлением, поглощением и каустикой, отдельные настроения для биомов Незера
и процедурное небо Энда. Поддержан LabPBR 1.3.
Пять пресетов от Potato до Ultra, около 90 настроек на четырнадцати экранах,
интерфейс на русском и английском.
- Требуется Iris 1.7+, Minecraft 1.21.x. С OptiFine несовместим.**
Ограничения честно перечислены в английской секции выше — если коротко:
каскады теней аналитические, а не настоящие; GI, AO и отражения экранные;
POM нет; без TAA будет шумно.
