Create luminous, dye-in-liquid vortices in a true 3D GPU volume. Full source, editable emitters, deterministic presets, adaptive quality, raymarch lighting and bloom.Validated in Unity 6000.3.21f1 with the Built-in Render Pipeline, URP 17.3.0, and HDRP 17.3.0. Custom render pipelines are not supported. Requires compute shaders, structured buffers, writable floating-point textures, and a desktop discrete GPU. WebGPU browser builds require a hardware WebGPU adapter; WebGL2, SwiftShader, mobile, and software renderers are not supported.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• Validated in Unity 6000.3.21f1.• True 3D structured-buffer simulation; not a billboard or flipbook.• Fixed simulation frequency: 30 Hz.• Low: 64³ grid, 8 pressure iterations, 48 ray steps, 16,000 fibers.• Medium: 96³ grid, 12 pressure iterations, 72 ray steps, 32,000 fibers.• High: 136³ grid, 20 pressure iterations, 96 ray steps, 64,000 fibers.• Ultra: 152³ grid, 22 pressure iterations, 160 ray steps, 100,000 fibers.• Up to 64 persistent emitters and 32 queued impulses per simulation step.• Compute shaders, structured buffers and writable floating-point texture support are required.• Accepted Ultra evidence was captured in a Windows standalone build on an NVIDIA RTX 4090; measured simulation buffers were approximately 374 MiB, excluding render targets and engine overhead.• Desktop discrete GPUs are recommended. Mobile and software renderers are not supported.• The browser target requires a hardware WebGPU adapter. WebGL2, mobile browser and SwiftShader fallbacks are not included. Unity WebGPU remains experimental in Unity 6.3.• Built-in Render Pipeline, URP 17.3.0 and HDRP 17.3.0 are supported and independently validated.• No custom render pipeline support is claimed.• Shippable root: Assets/EtherealFluids.• No runtime third-party package, texture, model, audio or offline fluid-cache dependency.OpenAI Codex generated and revised portions of the C# runtime and editor code, compute and rendering shader code, automated tests, documentation, and presentation-layout code. The publisher selected, integrated, reviewed, edited where necessary, and validated these outputs in Unity 6000.3.21f1. Final store images were composed from publisher-owned standalone captures. No AI-generated textures, models, audio, customer-reference imagery, or third-party content are included.
