Veil Iris Lights Compat

Client-side Veil light rendering for Iris shaderpacks.

Minecraft 1.21.1 | NeoForge 21.1.228+ | Client-side only | Current version: 1.6.0

Veil Iris Lights Compat, shortened to VILC, keeps dynamic Veil point, spot, and area lights visible while Iris is installed. With a shaderpack enabled, VILC draws Veil's light data in its own light pass after Iris has finished the level image. With shaderpacks disabled, it renders the same lights in a fallback pass.

VILC does not translate or run other Veil shader effects inside Iris.

VILC does not add blocks, items, mobs, or gameplay content. It is a rendering compatibility mod for other mods that already use Veil, including Lights? YesMenn!, Nox Lights, and other standard Veil light sources.

What It Does

• Renders standard Veil point lights with Iris shaderpacks
• Renders standard Veil spot lights with Iris shaderpacks
• Renders standard Veil rectangular area lights with Iris shaderpacks
• Supports cone-shaped area lights
• Supports moving and rotating lights when the source mod updates their transform
• Supports multiple differently colored lights in the same scene
• Keeps saturated colors strong: a pure red light stays red instead of washing out
• Reconstructs world positions and surface normals from depth data
• Adds diffuse, angle-aware light response on lit surfaces
• Supports configurable voxel occlusion and block shadows
• Preserves visible texture detail under bright colored lighting
• Live appearance controls for light tuning
• Fallback pass when Iris is installed but shaderpacks are disabled
• Recovers light-pass framebuffers after window resize and fullscreen changes

Why VILC Is Needed

Veil turns off the buffers its own light renderer depends on as soon as Iris is installed, even with shaderpacks disabled. Without VILC, Veil lights either disappear under a shaderpack or show up as a magenta checkerboard pattern on screen and on the player's hand. VILC skips Veil's broken light pass in that situation and renders the lights itself.

Dynamic Light Support

VILC works with Veil's standard light data:

• PointLightData
• SpotLightData
• AreaLightData

Veil's DirectionalLightData is not rendered by VILC yet.

For compatible mods, spot and area lights can also expose extra beam shaping:

• Beam angle
• Edge softness
• Focus
• Lens or emitter size
• Direction and rotation

These controls are useful for stage lights, searchlights, decorative RGB spotlights, live show setups, technical builds, and other scenes where a light should behave like a directed beam rather than a glowing point.

Configuration

Open the configuration from the mod list or with O by default.

If Lights? YesMenn! is installed as well, both entry points open a combined settings screen with VILC's rendering options and the lamp color settings of Lights? YesMenn!.

Configuration is stored in:

config/veil_iris_lights.json

Quality Presets

Preset	Point Lights	Area Lights	Surface Normals	Voxel Shadows
Performance	24	8	Fast	Disabled
Balanced	48	16	Fast	Enabled
High	96	32	Detailed	Enabled

Every major performance setting can also be tuned manually:

• Point-light budget from 1 to 96
• Area-light budget from 1 to 96
• Detailed or fast surface normals
• Voxel shadow toggle

Appearance controls update live:

• Exposure
• Color strength
• Color saturation
• Neutral brightness
• Color luminance limit

The Reset button restores the appearance controls without wiping custom light budgets and quality options.

Debugging

VILC adds render information to F3 and BetterF3:

• Whether the VILC light pass is active
• Visible point and area lights compared to the configured light budgets
• Current quality preset
• Voxel occlusion state
• Current appearance values

This helps to check whether the VILC pass is running, whether a scene has reached its light budget, or whether voxel shadows are currently active.

Requirements

Dependency	Requirement
Minecraft	1.21.1
NeoForge	21.1.228 or newer
Iris	1.8.14 beta 1 or newer
Veil	4.5.2 or newer
Sodium	0.8.12 beta 1 or newer

Install VILC only on clients. Dedicated servers do not need it.

Mod Developer Support

Mods using Veil's standard PointLightData, SpotLightData and AreaLightData are picked up automatically. A direct dependency on VILC is not required for standard lights.

Mods can optionally use VILC's light shape support (AreaLightShapeRegistry): area lights get per-light edge softness and focus, spot lights get focus and a lens radius (their soft edge comes from Veil's own spot angle). Lights without extra shaping render with the default behavior.

Blocks that contain their own light source can opt out of self-occlusion with the tag:

#veil_iris_lights:non_occluding

Client mods may also register non-occluding blocks directly:

VeilIrisLightOcclusion.registerNonOccluding(
    ResourceLocation.fromNamespaceAndPath("example", "light_block")
);

Addons that show VILC's options in their own settings screen can register it with ConfigScreenBridge.registerCombinedScreen(...). VILC's mod list entry and config key then open that combined screen.

Directional lights and custom Veil light renderer types outside the standard point, spot, and area APIs may need separate integration.

Compatibility Notes

• Shaderpacks differ heavily, so unusual pipelines may still need specific compatibility work
• VILC is client-side and does not change server behavior
• Voxel shadows use a camera-centered 64 x 64 x 64 block grid
• Complex block models are approximated for occlusion
• Leaves use partial voxel transmission rather than full texture-alpha sampling
• Occlusion outside the active voxel grid cannot be perfectly reconstructed
• Light budgets limit how many visible Veil lights are processed per frame; spot lights share the area-light budget
• The first-person hand and held items are currently not lit by VILC
• While Iris is installed, VILC replaces Veil's own light pass in both the shaderpack and the fallback pass
• Visual beam meshes from other mods are still controlled by those mods

Works Well With

• Lights? YesMenn! for configurable RGB blocks, panels, tubes, real Veil spotlights, invisible lights, and light tooling
• Nox Lights and other mods using standard Veil point or area lights
• BetterF3 for extended debug layouts

What's New in 1.6.0

• Veil spot lights are now rendered with Iris, with and without a shaderpack
• Visible light beams (Veil in-scattering) with on/off toggle and quality setting
• Overlapping colored lights mix properly (red + blue = magenta)
• The voxel shadow option now works for all Veil lights
• Round spot light lenses, optional focus, lens size and chromatic fringe for compatible mods
• Flashlights from compatible mods no longer light the first-person hand
• Fixed dark outlines around foliage and flowers, and a crash when enabling shadows with a shaderpack active
• Better performance with many lights and wide light beams

What's New in 1.5.1

• Updated to Veil 4.5.2
• Fixed the full-screen magenta checkerboard and magenta first-person hand with Iris installed
• Much stronger saturated light colors with shaderpacks
• Fixed a thin dark ring that could appear around the player
• Combined settings screen together with Lights? YesMenn!
• Shaderpack detection uses the official Iris API
• Smaller download: removed an unused bundled library

License

VILC is released under the YesMenn Custom License 1.0:

• Free to use for personal, educational, and non-commercial purposes
• Free modpacks may include official releases, with credit to xcruell and YesMenn and a link to this page
• No paywalled, subscription, or paid modpacks
• No reuploads, mirrors, or modified builds without permission
• Commercial use only with prior written permission, so please ask first

Other mods may depend on VILC and build compatibility addons. The full license text is included in the mod jar and the source repository.

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Made by xcruell and YesMenn