Yeah, I'm aware that there are screen space light shafts and true volumetric light shafts. Truth to be told, I'm now confused as hell by dr rus's earlier posts. I know how to tell screen space and volumetric light shafts apart, but his post was kinda complicated and now I'm confused if it's just that simple or if there's more to it than that. Just shows that I still have a lot to learn about all this.IIRC:
The volumetric shafts in Uncharted 3 in a number of scenes I looked at (I think the museum or temple scene at night? the one with all the guards that have it attached to their pistols) do not cast shadows and are not really spot light sources from what I saw. Rather, they are just screen space shafts eminating from a point on the screen. They only form intersectional rays and occlusion within screenspace boundaries facing the camera. So if the effect's source point is out of screenspace, or if the "light shaft" is perpendicular to the camera direction, it will not show off the "rays effect". Rather, it will just look like a coloured cone that can also go through geometry and look a bit weird. I think in those type of scenes where they have like 3 or 4 of them on screen, it is usually screen space effect. I have not seen all scenes in the game though!
Though! There is a traditional ray marched volumetric used in UC3. You can see it at the one boat area with all the waves at night or when you enter the ruins for the first time after coming out of the desert wandering area.
There appear to be two types: real and fake.