I was co-designer (and minorly, developer) of Pseudo Interactive's in-house node-based shader editor.  This project was a testbed for the editor, including many different surfaces.  My goal for the project was to dispense with the uniform feel of a programmatic shader tree, instead creating custom shaders for each surface to bring out each object's unique tactile characteristics.

The marble has a secondary blurred and parallaxed diffuse, more apparent in brighter areas, to simulate subsurface scattering.  The wood uses a specialized normal map to simulate the bi-directional sheen of wood grain.  The textiles use a fresnel shader to lend them a subtle softness or fuziness.  The metal and glass shaders don't use diffuse lighting at all -- their surface characteristics are rendered mostly through normal mapping and reflections.  The light beams have animated UVs for the moving dust motes, and use fresnel and inverse-distance falloff to disguise their geometric nature.

The piece de resistance is the glass tile mosaic, which uses normal mapping, two parallax steps in different directions, and tinted and masked reflections.  Check out my demo reel to see it in motion.

These images were captured from Xbox 360.