Viscous Liquid Shader (Oddity.004)

Viscous Liquid Shader (Oddity.004)

A hyper-realistic iridescent black oil shader. Real-time WebGL2 fluid sim that responds to mouse speed + drag to carve, watch it shimmer.

Drag your cursor across the screen and watch it carve furrows into a surface of iridescent black oil. Fast strokes generate deep, pronounced distortions; slow movements produce subtle, whisper-thin trails. Thin-film interference paints rainbow shimmer inside the disturbed regions while the resting surface stays pitch black.

What’s inside:
A miniature Navier-Stokes fluid solver running on WebGL2 ping-pong frame buffers

  • Velocity advection, vorticity confinement, 20-iteration Jacobi pressure projection, viscous damping
  • Mouse-driven splats along the segment between frames so fast motion never gaps
  • Super-linear force scaling tied to smoothed pointer speed
  • Iridescent shading: reconstructed normals, Schlick Fresnel, GGX specular, thin-film interference, faked environment reflection, ACES tone map, chromatic aberration, film grain
  • Half-res sim, full-res render, DPR capped at 2, dt clamped, visibility-aware RAF loop
  • Graceful fallback when WebGL2 or float textures are unavailable

Use it for:

  • Living hero backgrounds for product launches
  • Generative art experiments
  • Studying real-time shader and fluid simulation patterns
  • A starting point for your own oil / mercury / water / honey variants
  • Curing boredom on a Saturday night
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