YouTube’s member ‘hodilton’ has shared a video, showing off a realistic, high resolution and high quality resource/texture pack for Minecraft with some Ray Tracing effects. The results are mind-blowing and completely transform Minecraft into a current-gen title, full with highly detailed textures and lighting effects.
According to its official page, the Stratum Texture Pack is built with shader compatibility in mind and supports many of high end shader effects, including Parallax Occlusion Mapping, which provides a new layer of depth to surfaces in game, as well as high quality normal and specular maps. Stratum also uses fully Physically Based materials, just like many AAA titles do today.
“Stratum is being built specifically with Continuum in mind, but it should work well with a variety of other Minecraft shaders. It should also run on a variety of systems; more modest gaming rigs can choose one of the lower resolution options, such as 256x, or maybe 512x. Higher end systems can go with 1024x, and the highest end systems of the future can use the full 2048x pack (In it’s final form OptiFine will not be able to load this pack on modern hardware, upon Nova’s completion this should become a more viable resolution for a wide range of systems).
For now, the pack is only going to cover the base Minecraft textures, but in the future there will likely be add-on modules for mods, such as Better Foliage, or even Buildcraft. That said, as it is still currently being developed, the focus is only on finishing the base game textures for now.”
In the following video, hodilton used the 2K pack for Stratum alongside the Continuum RT Shaders. Continuum RT aims to make fully Ray-Traced Minecraft a reality by taking advantage of Voxel Cone Tracing, Spatio-Temporal Filtering, the latest Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function’s (BRDF’s) and other lighting methods.
“Some new features coming with RT are things like proper caustics through glass and water and temporally integrated cloud systems with proper light scattering functions. These features still boast all the great toning and camera features as their counterparts in the original Continuum shader.”
As said, the end result of this combination is truly incredible, making Minecraft look better than other triple-A games like Skyrim.
Enjoy the video below and kudos to our reader ‘Metal Messiah’ for bringing this to our attention!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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