Ethereal Fluids – Real-Time 3D GPU Fluid VFX

Shape light like liquid.

Ethereal Fluids is a full-source real-time volumetric VFX system for cohesive, luminous dye-in-liquid motion. Instead of assembling smoke from sprites or flipbooks, it evolves velocity, pressure, density and emissive scalar fields inside a true 3D GPU grid. The effect can be viewed from any angle and reshaped while the simulation is running.

The included Azure Ascension setup uses a neutral-buoyancy carrier. Dyed material is injected through a thin RibbonSlot, then rolled by controlled shear, turbulence, viscosity and vorticity into slow S-curves, crown vortices and separate fluid folds rather than freely rising particle smoke.

Everything is procedural. No baked fluid caches, models, textures, VFX Graph, Houdini or Blender files are required.

Author persistent flows with Source, Vortex, Attractor and Absorber modes. Choose Sphere, Capsule, Spline or RibbonSlot emitters, then tune flow speed, viscosity, mixing and diffusion, vorticity, turbulence strength and scale, dissipation, sharpening and material response.

A deterministic analytic emission compensator balances emitter load against exposure, helping the luminous core remain readable without washing out the entire volume.

Rendering includes volumetric atlas raymarching, Beer-Lambert extinction, density-gradient lighting, precomputed self-shadowing, blue-white HDR emission, atmospheric blending, manual render scaling, five-level bloom, tone mapping and optional GPU-generated flow fibers.

Four workload tiers scale the simulation from 64³ to 152³ cells. Auto quality monitors frame time and changes tier by resampling the live GPU state instead of restarting the effect. Fixed-step simulation, integer seeds and JSON replay make motion repeatable.

Start from the included demo scene and five editable presets, create scene-driven emitters, or control the volume through C#. The public API includes Play, Pause, Step, Reset, SetPreset, SetQuality, Burst and Inject, together with Ready, QualityChanged and Faulted events. Browser projects can use the included window.EtherealFluids JavaScript bridge.

Included:

• Complete C#, compute-shader and rendering-shader source

• One demo scene and five editable preset assets

• Custom inspectors

• Four emitter modes and four emitter shapes

• Adaptive quality tiers

• Deterministic replay example

• C# and browser integration APIs

• Setup, architecture, compatibility and browser documentation