Improved Ray Traced Shadows

Note on Witcher 3 4. 04 patch:

The patch release notes mention improving lighting on hair - I have briefly tested it and found this mod is still useful to reduce hair issues with RT shadows (as well as improving quality).

Changes in modImprovedRayTracedShadows_v3. 4:

• [] Reduced RTSTConfigInstancingDistance to 40, to fully fix all frametime spikes (stutter) that could occur when turning near trees (Thank you CapoM235i.)

Changes in modImprovedRayTracedShadows_v3. 3:

• []Reduced RTSTConfigInstancingDistance from 90 to 80, to fix frametime spikes in a couple of places (thank you CapoM235i.)

Changes in modImprovedRayTracedShadows_v3. 2:

• []Reduced pop-in of small objects' shadows even more - pop-in distance is now double that of vanilla. This gives great quality but is slightly slower than v3. 1. Slightly reduced max distance of shadows to 600 metres.

Changes in modImprovedRayTracedShadows_v3. 1:

• []New Speedtree config compatible with patch 4. 03 - Now shadows move up to 35m away instead of 20m away. This gives a good balance of quality & performance. The bigger range needed for good quality before patch 4. 03 isn't necessary now.

• []Fixed some occasional minor shadow jumping that could still occur in 4. 03.

Changes in modImprovedRayTracedShadows_v3. 0:

• []Removed Speedtree settings. In Witcher 3 4. 03 CDPR have fixed the jumping tree shadow glitches.

• []Mostly fixed issues with Geralt's hair (which is still not fixed in patch 4. 03.)

• []New default setting to reduce pop-in of small objects compared to vanilla.

Known bugs:

• []Ray Tracing in Witcher 3 doesn't work well with the Hairworks graphics option - if the shadow of geralt's head is wrong then turn Hairworks off, or use this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/7217

  []Hair isn't always perfect, but it is much more often correct, especially at dawn and dusk, than without the mod.

  []Shadows of very small objects like cups may still visibly pop-in. I think Witcher 3's heuristic for what to add to ray tracing underestimates small objects with a cube shaped bounding box.

  []At some angles grass shadows may disappear at the screen edge. This is because grass is only ray-traced in screen-space and not in world-space

These bugs are present in Witcher 3 and can only be reduced, not fixed by the mod.

Dependencies: None

Compatibility:

[]Tested with Witcher 3 4. 03 and 4. 04.

[]Not compatible with FasterRTifNoRTShadows.ini from "Faster RT if No RT Shadows" mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/7891). However, you CAN use it with FasterRTUltraPerformanceGlobalIllum