Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - Chapter 03 - A Surprising Find
I wrote the sun flare shader and, as I did for the Jak sequels, created the texture. For each level (and any cutscene the sun appears within), I fine tuned the flare color and occlusion radius. It works particularly well when seen through the waterfall of this level.
I also programmed shaders for the waterfall and particle mist below, both of which employ depth blending and are built upon a similar foundation (though the former is applied to modeled geometry). Though the particle variation is capable of up to four levels of parallax, the mist employs a single layer for performance reasons. The waterfall can employ an additional layer of parallaxed alpha blending, can have the parallax offset increase based on vertex shading (for a greater sense of volume near the bottom) and has a modulated fresnel term so you never see a hard edge. The waterfall's diffuse shading is modulated by the alpha function so that lighting becomes more directional and shadows more prominent when the foam is more opaque, each layer has a height map to offset the shadow sampler and depth blending, each layer casts a faked alpha-blended shadow upon the next for greater depth, and an environment map picks up blended normal maps to give the falls an additional sheen that is more prevalent in motion.
