When you look at photos or videos of different resource packs, you cannot ignore that they simply look gorgeous. These promotional materials are deliberately made to impress but the moment you install the resource pack, you may notice that it does not look as pretty. This happens because all those stunning visuals are achieved by having something extra on top. Shader packs are the missing element that makes Minecraft look great. One such notable example is ProjectLUMA. ProjectLUMA shader pack can be seen as a passion project. The development team behind the shader pack took inspiration from KUDA shaders and wanted to make a spiritual successor. Built from scratch using new and original code, the shader pack aims to tackle some core problems that most other shader packs struggle with. One of the main focuses of the team behind ProjectLUMA is performance. Shader packs are known to be resource hogs. If you are running Minecraft on an older system, the moment you install some new shaders, you will see a drastic performance drop. This does not happen with ProjectLUMA or at least, the performance drop is not as drastic. The ProjectLUMA shader pack was released in late 2019 and since then it has not received any free updates. At the moment of release, the developers already finished work on the shader pack and made it available for multiple versions of Minecraft. But you can still get newer versions of this shader pack by supporting authors on their official patron page.
Being a spiritual successor to KUDA shader, ProjectLUMA follows a similar visual style. It introduces several improvements that considerably improve Minecraft. It works with most resource packs but even when installed on vanilla Minecraft, it makes a considerable impact. The shader pack brings several new features. They introduce new reflections which will be easy to notice when looking at the water. It also improves ambient occlusion and adds motion blur. The shader pack also alters the way water looks by adding realistic water waves. Additionally, the developers added dirty lens, auto bump, POM, and a few other features. One of the most note-worthy improvements is made to the way the sky looks in Minecraft. The Godrays feature in ProjectLUMA adds better lighting effects, light rays and changes the way the Sun looks. It also affects how shadows are projected on the ground. At the same time, the clouds look photorealistic. These improvements can also be observed during the nighttime. All the improvements and features present in the ProjectLUMA shaders also affect the textures in the game. Even when using it with an x16 or x32 resource pack, ProjectLUMA makes textures look cleaner. Details are easier to observe and colors are brighter. The ProjectLUMA shader pack needs to be installed with a tool such as OptiFine. Because it alters the sky and water, it needs access to the special features that this tool offer. Because ProjectLUMA adds many new features and effects to Minecraft, it may negatively impact your framerate. Sadly, there is no possibility to turn on or off certain features. For optimal performance, the shader pack is recommended to be installed with resource packs that use texture resolutions no higher than x64.
