Shadow of the Colossus

Thank you!

But you have to remember, SotC's art style is probably the best in any game for HDR.

 

They also have shaders on the horse and main guy.

 

After reading that "making of", I really do appreciate the game even more now.
As Reverend said, it's beauty is subtle, but it's what makes the game feel so good, even though the sometimes grainy image quality might not lead you to believe it can be a beautiful looking game.
Can't wait to see what they'll be able to do with the PS3.
Really shows what creative designers and programmers can achieve when they tink "out of the box".
Sometimes just faking it can be convincing enough.

 

Yeah, this explains how the HDR worked. It basically centered around the main character. How hard that is to pull off on the ps2, I have no idea. But it looks damn nice!

 

Interview: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70286-0.html?tw=rss.culture

 

The basic technique for fur-shading (concentric shells with alpha textures) should be utterly trivial on the PS2 (all it really needs is some extra geometry for the shells, and a lot of fillrate for the alpha textures), so i'm not sure why it's got so much press, and why it hasn't been done much before. The only time pixel shaders would really come into it is when you want to use complex lighting models, which afaict, hasn't been done much in games, probably due to performance concerns (or if any games _have_ used complex lighting, it really doesn't make that much difference, or i simply haven't seen them...).

The only reason it's been particularly associated with the xbox, from what i can tell, is that the technique was originally developed by a Microsoft researcher (and they probably threw some example code for it in the dev kit/docs).

 

an automated version.the basic principle has been hand made for long.It's still way better when done by hand by good artists ,but it's very very tedious.