The long awaited successor to one of the most customizable and sophisticated ENB presets is here.
Featuring improvements on all fronts to deliver the best experience possible, this universally usable ENB can be paired with (almost) any weather mod and will adapt itself accordingly.

Silent Horizons 2 - Universal Core is first and foremost a gameplay and performance oriented ENB, unlike its predecessor.
Its aim is not to completely overhaul the look of your game but rather to improve what's already there.
It does this through its one-of-a-kind post processing setup paired with a carefully tweaked ENB config.
This allows the preset to deliver stunning visuals without sacrificing tons of FPS.

Silent Horizons 2 - New Dawn is currently in development/early access and is the more heavy, screenarcher oriented counterpart to the Core lineup.

Hybrid Linear Lighting:

Instead of doing lighting purely in gamma or linear space, SH2 converts textures into an intermediate color space that provides an improved way of lighting the scene while still staying compatible with textures that have been designed for the vanilla system.

Attenuated Histogram Adaptation:

My custom logarithmic adaptation shader that keeps the scene as evenly lit as possible at all times.
Featuring intuitive controls for a vastly improved user experience, it actively helps the preset adapting to almost everything you throw at it instead of getting in the way.

Texture enhancements with KiSharp:

The next evolution of my sharpening shader. Reacting to both object edges and local contrast to adjust itself accordingly, allows it to bring out texture details without adding ugly haloing or risking oversharpening.
Also works perfectly to compensate temporal anti-aliasing (TAA/DLAA) or even upscaling.



On/Off Comparison:

2 Dynamic 2 Bloom:

The new generation of my bloom shader. Sporting a simplified yet still powerful UI that gives you full control at all times.
It's also now taking full advantage of all passes by implementing smooth upscaling to avoid aliasing artifacts.
On top of that you have the option to do depth-based tweaking with unmatched accuracy.

Mapping all the Tones:

Before leaving the world of HDR, my tonemapper ties everything together.
Using a custom curve that is not only extremely fast and easy to tweak but also provides optimal highlight compression, to ensure as much data as possible is preserved.
Alternatively there are a bucket load of other tonemapper options included.

Grading and adjusting your Colors:

Everyone who used the first Silent Horizons will feel right at home here. Featuring the familiar and powerful color grading suite (KiSuite) and its smaller, but certainly not less important, HDR counterpart.
The Monochroma shader is of course also included again for all fans of color keyed saturation tweaking.

Space for Imagespaces:

AGIS (Apply Game ImageSpaces) is of course also back again.
Allowing the games per-weather color tweaks, spell effects, the night eye or fade to black effects to be supported out of the box.

Rethinking Anti-Aliasing:

Not only are both SMAA and FXAA included again, they are now fully tweakable from the GUI thanks to the ENB Extender.
SMAA also received some upgrades under the hood to ensure a more robust implementation.

Fighting banding with Dithering:

Also included again is my custom dithering shader to combat any kind of color banding with a pleasing gaussian-distributed blue noise pattern. Fast and clean.

LUT up your world:

If you thought that the LUT system in Silent Horizons 1 was ground breaking, this one can only be classified as earth shattering.

The most powerful and adaptive LUT system ever seen in an ENB. You won't need a single bit of HLSL knowledge to utilize the full power of it.
Mix and match whatever you want. Atlases, single LUTs, day-night-interior separatation and even per-weather LUTs.
Everything can be loaded with a simple single line of "code", the shader and UI will adapt to it automatically.

After the Effects:

Of course the usual after effect suspects are featured again as well. Like the familiar, customizable vignette shader and the infamous black bars.

ENB Features:

These have been carefully selected and tweaked to ensure the usual Silent Horizons quality and performance that you came to expect.

Installation:

• Install ENB Extender
• Install a weather and lighting mod of your choice
• Install Particle Patch for ENB
• Download the latest ENB binaries
• Copy d3d11.dll and d3dcompiler_46e.dll into your Skyrim folder
• Copy everything from the Silent Horizons 2 archive into your Skyrim folder
  

Recommendations and Considerations:

It's highly recommended to use EVLaS alongside SH2.
While the Universal Core is technically compatible with all weather mods, some are going to work better than others.

Authors recommendation:

• Obsidian Weathers and Seasons (optionally with Aequinoctium Add-On Patch)
• Aequinoctium Weathers and Seasons
• NAT - Standalone (with all "Graphic Options" disabled in its in-game settings menu)
  

Frolique for the logo design, testing, feedback and screenshots
Weather Painter Ashley for testing and feedback


Big thanks to all my Patrons, especially Black Rabbit and YahwehChild (Draconic Foxes)

Have fun with Silent Horizons everyone <3 - Kitsuune