Real CSM - Modern Lighting & Realistic Dynamic Shadows

Now 2.0! Fully rewritten from the ground up.

Cleaner, faster, better. Less broken addons. New features. Same price (free :D).

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Maintaining mods takes a lot of free time: please consider supporting me on Ko-fi if you enjoy it! https://ko-fi.com/xenthio I absolutely refuse to make this mod paid, so help me keep it that way. ❤️

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Finally, a real cascading shadow implementation on the workshop. Spawn it manually or set it to spawn automatically on map load.

To use it: spawn the CSM Editor from Entities > Editors in the spawn menu. Quality settings (including soft shadows) are in Utilities > User > Real CSM.

Quick note before you start:

This looks best on maps with a named light_environment, but it'll still "work" on any map. Try it on gm_construct! looks great!

Let me know what other maps work well with it, I haven't had time to go through many. My favourite right now is (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2483210216).

Some optional features and optimisations require NikNaks to work.

Join the Discord for help, support, and to see what else I'm working on: https://discord.gg/Y2M39gTNXD

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Make sure shadow quality is set to High in your video settings.

This is the fastest and best-looking CSM implementation on the workshop. This addon is also designed to take up 0 resources when not in use, meaning it's good for many use cases, no more constantly enabling and disabling addons!

Shoutout to Blueberry_pie for the original work this was based on.

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For Mappers

Please name your light_environments and add env_suns to your maps. Not just for this addon, loads of other addons depend on it too.

Naming a light_environment by default disables sun bounce lighting. In the latest GMod you can use the -bouncefromnamed compile option to fix that. For older versions, I have a custom vrad build that does the same thing (may increase compile times a bit): https://xenthio.github.io/stuff/vrad-csm-v1.zip

Any map that doesn't work well with this isn't something I can fix, ask the original mapper if they can update their map with a named light_environment!

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Bugs & Feature Requests

https://github.com/Xenthio/RealCSM/issues

Want to contribute?

Chuck a PR here: https://github.com/Xenthio/RealCSM

Tested on multiplayer. Works as long as everyone has the addon.

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F.A.Q.

StormFox 2 support? Play with csm_stormfoxsupport, csm_stormfox_brightness_multiplier and csm_stormfox_coloured_sun.

Auto-spawn on map load? csm_spawnalways 1

Shadows are blocky / staircasy! Raise shadow quality in the Utilities tab or increase r_flashlightdepthres in console.

No shadows / map is super bright! Make sure shadow quality is set to High in gmod video settings.

Can't enable high shadow quality! This means gmod thinks you cant use shadowmapping. Add -force_vendor_id 0x10DE -force_device_id 0x1180 to your launch options to force it.

Is this Ray Tracing / RTX? No it isn't. Just regular old projected textures.

Can this be ported to Source SDK? Someone's already doing it! Check it out here.

But this isn't REAL CSM, it's just projected textures! No it is real csm, there's proper cascades and stuff, I just use projected textures to achieve this.

It's too laggy! While this doesn't require too beefy of a computer to run you will have a hard time running it on something really old. Runs fine on my old 2012 MacBook so I would say that's roughly your minimum. Try enabling things like gmod_mcore_test 1 in console to improve your gmod framerate.

Tags cause steam workshop search sucks: CSM, Cascading Shadows, Shadows, Graphics Enhancement, Graphics Mods, Realistic Lighting, Better Lights, Better Shadows, Realistic Shadows, Dynamic Lighting, Dynamic Shadows, HD GMOD, Realistic Garry's Mod, Realistic Gmod, HD, Ultra realism, Scene building, Scene lighting, CSGO Shadows, CSGO Lighting, Counter Strike Lighting, Counter Strike shadows