Lovely morning to you Amoebae! I was wondering, how can I get indirect lighting? I see it's an option in MXAO for you, but for me, I don't have indirect lighting. Is there somewhere I can download the old MXAO shader? (silly to ask such a thing, I know.) I think the reason I don't have it is because I'm on reshade 4.0?
Good morning (or afternoon) to you too, lovely anon!
Because of the way IL is calculated it has to be turned on via the Preprocessor Definitions section in ReShade.
There are two ways to do this. Either works just as well as the other, so it’s personal preference.
1. If you look at the top screenshot in this MXAO tutorial you’ll see some extra lines inside the Preprocessor Definitions box that is in the Settings tab. Everything with MXAO at the beginning is what you need to add in.
Strictly, I believe only ENABLE_IL is needed for IL, but they all do good things for the MXAO shader so it’s worth adding them all. Generally 0 = off, and 1 = on, except for...
The two that say MIPLEVEL relate to the quality of both the ambient occlusion (the shadowing you’re most familiar with) and the IL. 0 is the best quality, 2 is the least, 1 is in the middle. I honestly don’t know if there’s a discernible difference to how it looks, but I keep them both on 0 because I can. If you struggle with performance, consider dropping them to 1.
SMOOTHNORMALS is meant to help with some of the awkward angles you can see when MXAO shadows blocky models. It seems to have more of an effect in non-qUINT versions of MXAO. 1 = on, 0 = off.
TWO-LAYER enables finer control and splits AO into Fine and Coarse. To my eyes fiddling with either of the multiplier values produces exactly the same effect, but the Fine AO Scale does something different... I’m not exactly sure what but it’s another value to play around with if you’re looking for perfection. 1 = on, 0 = off.
BACKFACE is to do with whether the backs of objects will be lit or not, and enabling it is meant to increase realism (at the cost of performance). This setting isn’t used in newer versions of MXAO, so your version may not use it. 1 is on, 0 is off.
The way to check if your version uses a particular preprocessor definition is to open up the mxao.fx file in Notepad++ or similar and look at the top section. All of the commands above will be listed there (using slightly different formats to how you list them in the gui, but you’ll be able to tell which is which). If backface isn’t there, your version doesn’t use it.
Which brings me to the second way you can enable IL (and these other commands).
2. Directly in the mxao.fx file. You can go in and edit the lines right in the file with your zeros and ones, save, and you’ll never have to worry about adding them to the gui. This is, arguably, much quicker and easier, and it persists wherever you paste that mxao.fx file (if you use ReShade in different games and use the same shaders, just use your edited shader and you’re good to go). It also means you don’t have to guess which definitions are applicable to your version of mxao because they’re right there.
I know a lot of people aren’t comfortable editing the shader files directly, but the second method here is so much quicker and easier, I definitely recommend doing that.
















