BLUEI'S BETTER VISUALS v6.15.0 - VELVET AIR
Vanilla-first cinematic shader pack for Iris and Sodium

EDITION
Windows build

TARGET
Minecraft Java Edition
Iris and Sodium
Fancy graphics recommended for complete transparent leaf geometry

INSTALL
1. Remove older duplicate copies from the Minecraft shaderpacks folder.
2. Copy Blueis-Better-Visuals-v6.15.0-windows.zip into shaderpacks.
3. Select Bluei's Better Visuals in the Iris shader-pack menu.
4. Try the untouched configuration first. It is already tuned as the intended
   Vanilla presentation.

FRESH-INSTALL PRESENTATION
The untouched pack opens in Vanilla style. Minecraft's actual sun and moon
textures, including moon phases and resource-pack replacements, render directly.
The Overworld now uses one coherent warm cinematic atmosphere: clear pastel-blue
sky, golden sunlight, cool soft shade, peach sunset fog, cream-lit clouds,
gentle bloom, and deep blue nights. Auroras, meteors, and the Milky Way remain
optional controls. Fantasy remains an optional style.

WATER
Pelagic water is a new implementation built around a compact directional wave
spectrum. Long swells, crossing wind waves, capillary breakup, surface normals,
foam, refraction, caustics, and highlights are derived from the same analytic
wave state. World-locked broad and fine variation prevents large surfaces from
looking tiled or flat. Bounded second-order shaping adds smoother troughs and
more readable crests without the cost of a full FFT ocean.

Water now has a stronger optical body. Nearby shallows retain useful floor
detail, while distance and depth build suspended-particle haze until far water
becomes cloudy and murky instead of exposing the terrain beneath it.
Terrain and structure reflections use an undisplaced horizontal plane. Their
ray, blend, Fresnel, and roughness are isolated from animated wave slope, while
the moving waves remain visible in sky shimmer, glints, foam, and refraction.
Screen-visible sky is captured into the wave reflection with analytic sky as a
stable fallback. Caustics now use low-contrast warped irradiance with no hard
cell threshold, and only lightly affect upward-facing underwater surfaces.

CLOUDS AND ATMOSPHERE
Three continuous volumetric families create broad low cumulus, broken middle
cloud streets, and sparse stretched high wisps. Cloud lighting now uses softer
blue undersides, cream-white sunlight, warm sunset scattering, and a smoother
silver lining. Distance fog combines a clean near field with exponential aerial
depth, letting far terrain blend into the sky without washing out nearby blocks.
The color grade, fog curve, and wider bloom add no texture reads, and the cloud
ray-march counts are unchanged.

MATERIALS
Generated PBR remains the fresh-install block-material path. It provides
albedo-derived normals, roughness, porosity, clearcoat, metal response, emission,
subsurface response, and wetness without a default parallax loop. Authored
OldPBR and LabPBR modes remain selectable for compatible resource packs.

Ore textures, raw ore blocks, and metal or gem storage blocks retain ordinary
lit texture brightness before PBR highlights are added. Entity skins use real
model normals rather than generated texture derivatives, preventing creeper,
slime, and magma-cube texture seams or warped faces.

PROFILES
Vanilla and Fantasy each include Potato, Low, Medium, High, Ultra High, and
Extreme profiles. Selecting a profile supplies a complete style and quality
setup; every individual control remains editable afterward.

PERFORMANCE
v6.14 removes the former reflection-history resolve, reduces cloud marching at
every tier, lowers default terrain cloud-shadow noise, shortens Low shadow
kernels, trims particle and entity shadow taps, and replaces expensive
underwater 3D volume noise with analytic world-space light bands. Continuous
cloud density also removes the old per-sample voxel tint lookup.

v6.14.1 keeps the existing geometry-reflection step counts. Its screen-sky
reflection adds one guarded depth lookup and fetches sky color only for a valid
on-screen sky sample. The underwater patch removes two structured light-band
evaluations while increasing optical density.

v6.15.0 changes atmospheric math and palette weighting rather than increasing
sample counts. Sky, fog, cloud lighting, terrain lighting, Distant Horizons,
materials, bloom, and reflected environment now share one cinematic palette.

No fixed FPS number is promised. Resolution, render distance, transparent water
coverage, entities, resource packs, mods, and world complexity can dominate
performance. Compare versions at the same camera position and settings. Vanilla
Low is the recommended first fallback for a very dense established world.

LIMITS
Screen-space reflections can only reflect geometry and sky present in the
current rendered frame. Missing, off-screen, or low-confidence samples fall
back to stable analytic dimensional atmosphere. Static validation cannot
replace an in-game visual and performance test on the target GPU.

FILES
CHANGELOG.txt lists the v6.14 through v6.15 changes.
BUILD_INFO.txt documents the architecture and validation contract.
PERFORMANCE_NOTES.txt documents the main GPU budgets.
RESEARCH_INFLUENCES.txt records technique references and originality.
