The Liquid-in-a-Bottle Effect from Half-Life: Alyx Made in Blender

During the final days of 2021, a 3D Generalist and Concept Artist known as SamHatesUnicorns had released a fantastic liquid effect, created entirely in Blender. The author commented, that the idea behind the project was to recreate Half-Life: Alyx's liquid effects. The mystery behind the project was the exact way the effect was made without the usage of shaders and fluid sims.

Said mystery, however, has been dispelled pretty quickly by a Blender Artist Faaaaarck a.k.a. BlenderThings. According to Faaaaarck, and it was confirmed by Sam, the secret was the usage of the Wiggle Bones add-on, created by shteeve. The add-on allows you to add jiggly physics to bones by creating an armature in Blender and assigning the wiggly effect to the bones. You can learn more about the add-on and download it here.

Previously, several artists had tried to recreate a similar effect from Alyx, but in Unity and Unreal instead. Back in 2020, Technical Artist Ryan Brucks had created the liquid-in-a-bottle effect in Unreal Engine 4 using 3 sine waves controlled by a Float, controlled by a FInterpTo in the blueprint, with procedural Voronoi noise injected with the sine waves using a lagged Float to simulate the bubbles. You can learn more about Ryan's project here.

Another Technical Artist named Gil Damoiseaux had even joined 80 Level to tell us how to recreate the effect via a Surface shader in Unity. In our interview with Gil, he shared the technical details of his experiments with different kinds of liquids. You can read our interview with the artist here.

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