Maybe something like this too?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb_ZU1lCgnc[/youtube]
That was done in DBPro by Mike Inel, who used to frequent here. His projects were always very well done, but like me, he never finished them.
[edit]Correction, he did finish
this.
Most of it is shader effects and to be honest, I've not given shader programming much thought so I couldn't help you. But a great resource for shaders for DBP is Evolved's website.
http://www.evolved-software.com/
There's some great water, shadow and lighting effects you can achieve with them. You won't be able to do the above video and it seems Mike Inel has used his own shaders.
In the shot you've posted, it actually looks like the effect you're after can be achieve through lightmapping (except the slightly grainy feel, but you could do that with a shader). For free lightmapping software, one program where you should in theory be able to bake to that quality is Gile[s], however, there is also 3D World Studio (not free), but I don't know what rendering features it has (it's available from TGC).
Gile[s]
The effect is called global illumination (Ambient Occlusion is a type of global illumination), which is used by 3D rendering software and can also be baked into lightmaps in Gile[s] and some other lightmapping software. It is possible to have an ambient occlusion shader (usually screen space ambient occlusion of SSAO for short), but I've not seen any available for DBP.
I'd say using the lightmap method you'll be using fewer resources to achieve the effect, so if you're not up for coding your own SSAO shader, that's a good alternative
. Combine it with some of EVOLVED's shaders and you could have some really cool looking scenes.
I am using Gile[s] for my Unity3D project, but not tried it with DBP myself, so I don't know how smoothly the scenes loads.
