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Real CSM - Modern Lighting & Realistic Dynamic Shadows

Maintaining mods and fixing them takes a lot of free time, please please please consider supporting me on patreon.
https://patreon.com/Xenthio
I absolutely refuse to make this mod paid, so help me keep it that way

Finally, a real cascading shadow implementation on the workshop. Either with automatic spawning or manual spawning
To use this spawn the CSM Editor located in "Entities > Editors" in the spawnmenu.
Quality settings (including soft shadows) are located in "Utilities > User > CSM" in the spawnmenu.

This will look the best on maps that have a named light_environment, but will still work on any other map. Try it on gm_construct! looks great!
Let me know of any other maps that work with it, i haven't had time to go through many. My favourite is https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2483210216
Join the discord for help and support, and also to see what else I might be working on: https://discord.gg/Y2M39gTNXD


This is the Fastest and best looking 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!
Shout outs to Blueberry_pie for the original work I based this all off.

Make sure your shadow quality is set to high in your video settings

naming light environment by default will disable sun bounced lighting, In the latest version of gmod, you can use the new -bouncefromnamed compile option to make it bounce, for the older versions, I have a custom build of vrad that also does this. You can get it here! (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!

Wanna help? chuck a PR here! https://github.com/Xenthio/RealCSM

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


Stormfox 2 support?: play with the cvars csm_stormfoxsupport, csm_stormfox_brightness_multiplier and csm_stormfox_coloured_sun

CSM automatically on map load?: csm_spawnalways 1

Shadows are blocky and staircasy!: Raise the shadow quality either in the utility tab in the spawnmenu or by changing r_flashlightdepthres

Theres no shadows! the map is bright!: Make sure your gmod settings shadow quality is set to high

I can't enable high shadow quality!: add "-force_vendor_id 0x10DE -force_device_id 0x1180" to your launch options

Is this Ray Tracing / RTX ?: No it isn't, just your regular old projected textures.

Can this be put into Source SDK? Yeah someones already doing it! check out this github https://github.com/celisej567/Fake-CSM-Source-2013

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, this runs fine on my old 2012 macbook so i would say that's 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