Here is something i worked on for Olive, a small game we made in the AIS mod team. The characters here are mini-bosses that the player must defeat in order to progress. Each was modeled and textured by Aaron Hain, while I worked on the shaders. For comparison, we have the original models by Aaron on the left, and the models with enhanced shaders on the right. 

Plant MiniBoss Shader - Features fake ambient light contribution and a Fresnel Rim light. The ambient contribution could be roughly described as the diffuse texture, to the power of the ambient light amount, lerped back into the diffuse texture. It seemed to bring out quite a few nice details in the model.

Fire MiniBoss Shader - Features fake ambient light contribution, Fresnel Rim light, and pulsating glowy bits. The ambient contribution works the same way as the Plant MiniBoss Shader, with the addition of a emissive map in the alpha channel of diffuse. An additional texture scrolls across the emissive map, causing sections to glow brightly and then cool in sequence. 

Water MiniBoss Shader -  Features fake ambient light contribution, Fresnel Rim light, and interpolated Specularity and FLOWMAPS! Its probably a BIT more expensive than it needs to be but it was so cool i had to do it. 

Water has been an elusive and challenging subject for me. There are many methods to create water in 3d, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately though, all anyone wants is something that looks convincing, fits the art style, and doesn't reduce the framerate to 5 fps (unless you are into that sort of thing). Flowmaps - as described in this Siggraph presentation from Valve - can be quite convincing, have a low overhead, and are quite flexible to an art style. 

 After reading the presentation, I knew i had to give it a shot. After a few weeks of struggle and experimentation, these are my results (The rocks you see come with UDK). We can modify the direction, as well as the speed of the water by simply modifying the color of the texture. This shader uses vertex colors as the flowmap, which can later be baked out into a texture (The shader has toggle-able options for both for completeness). I also wrote another version in Unity for Olive which you can see here:

 I like the result, and it's only one extra draw call vs plain scrolling UVs! In the future i would like to research how to generate these flowmaps dynamically. Painting them is a bit of a pain and i'd rather my computer do it for me XD.