FluidNinja Live 2 ships for Unreal Engine, Windows only for now

Andras Ketzer has released FluidNinja Live 2, a full rewrite of his real-time fluid system for Unreal Engine, after three years of development. The catch for anyone shipping a game is in the compatibility table: Live 2 currently deploys to Windows only, where Live 1 covered consoles, Linux, Android and iOS.

FluidNinja Live has been around since December 2020 and is a project rather than a plugin — it wraps Niagara in a set of Blueprints and gives you water, fog, smoke, cloud, fire, sand and snow driven from bitmaps, Runtime Virtual Textures, landscapes, splines and bones. CG Channel reports it has been used on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Dune: Awakening and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, as well as Fortnite cinematics.

What actually changed

Ketzer describes Live 2 as new software rather than a patched Live 1, and the architecture backs that up. Most of the Blueprint work has moved off the CPU and onto the GPU, and the fluid simulation itself now runs in Niagara Simulation Stages. That is the change with the longest tail: sim cost lands in the same GPU budget you are already fighting over for characters, foliage and lighting, so profiling it means profiling Niagara rather than chasing Blueprint ticks.

The new surface-alignment tools replace what the release notes call the tedious water meshing and RVT landscape alignment of Live 1 — the part of the old workflow that ate a day whenever terrain moved. You can also save an entire FluidNinja state to a single preset, and feed simulations from particles, Mesh Distance Fields and Chaos destructibles.

Price, engine support, and the honest warning

Live 2 requires Unreal Engine 5.6 or newer. Live 1 stays on sale and still supports 4.26 and up, which matters if you are pinned to an older engine by a publisher or a licensed SDK. Perpetual Personal licences are $149 for individuals and studios under $100,000 a year in revenue; Professional licences are $2,999.99. Existing Live 1 owners get Live 2 as an upgrade.

Credit where it is due: the Fab listing says plainly that this is not a drag-and-drop tool and that learning it takes about a week. That is a rare thing to see on a store page, and it is worth believing. There is a free build and a playable demo on the developer's community server, which is the sensible way to find out whether the week is one you can spare.

If you are targeting console, Live 1 remains the production choice until the other platforms land. Ketzer says more hardware types are coming in future updates, but no date has been given.