In this project, I was in charge of PBR shaders and materials, and also had to create water shaders via Grab-Pass.
I worked with another 3 teammates and each one of us performed in a different role. Mine was Shader Programmer and Gameplay Programmer.
I implemented post-process effects such as bloom, vortex and distortion to the camera so it would create a simple underwater effect.
Also, Sun Shafts and animated caustics were added to give it more realism. Since the caustics were animated in a projector, they were drawn in all the surfaces using a single shader.
PBR helped us in many ways, including a very realistic illumination which was enhanced with the normal and detail normal maps. The Metallic and Roughness maps made it feel like the surfaces were actually wet.
The Grab-Pass shader of the water did an amazing job refracting the light via normal map with a little time-based offset, but it looked pretty amazing refracting light of the sun shafts. A very happy accident.
Whenever we got out of the water, we felt something was missing. It felt plain and unrealistic.
Our aproach was to create an effect that was also unrealistic but eliminated the plaininess of getting out of the water and seeing nothing.
I created a simple script that whenever we got out of the water, a plane in front of the camera would appear. This plane had a script controlled shader that managed to offset and control a normal map that refracted light in the form of drops, creating a drop falling in glass effect.
We replaced the typical bi-plane bushes with some amazing windforce sensitive bushes thanks to Unity5 speed tree.
Also enhanced the grass and sea textures so it would actually feel like it's an island, even if you can only see it in Scene view.