FLUIDLAB

Smoke and fire, simulated inside After Effects. Your layers are the fuel and the obstacles: text, shapes, and footage give off smoke, catch fire, slam down in bursts of dust, and push the air around.

Download for macOS Installer (.pkg) · Apple Silicon & Intel · free Download for Windows x64 installer (.exe) · free · beta
About

FluidLab is an After Effects effect that runs a real 2D fluid simulation on a layer. Pick up to three fuel layers and they give off smoke in their own colors (or burn, if you'd rather have fire). Pick collision layers and the smoke flows around them, and when they move they shove it out of the way. Everything is keyframable, and every frame renders the same way every time, in the Render Queue, with Multi-Frame Rendering, or in aerender.

What it looks like
White smoke rising from below and curling around the word COLLIDE
Smoke rising into a text layer used as a collider
A wide cloud of grey dust blasting out sideways from the word BAM on a white background
A burst of dust as a text layer slams down
Swirling smoke drawn as a grid of small glowing green squares on deep blue
Grid style, Phosphor palette
Smoke drawn as colored ASCII characters in a monospaced font
ASCII style, set in the included FluidLab Mono typeface
Features
Layers as fuel

Three fuel slots plus a built-in emitter. Smoke takes the layer's colors or a custom one, can inherit the layer's motion, or blows one way as a jet.

Layers as colliders

Three collision slots. Smoke flows around the layer's exact shape, and moving layers push it.

Fire

Fuel burns into heat, flame, and soot, and spreads by ignition temperature. The flames light the smoke around them and glow.

Bursts

Keyframe a burst and smoke or dust blasts out from a layer in every direction, for slams and impacts.

Lighting

A directional light with self-shadowing, three point or spot lights you drag around the comp, your comp's own lights, and other layers casting shadows onto the smoke.

Stylized looks

ASCII, Dot, Grid, Pixel, Flow, and Outline, with color palettes and bloom. ASCII comes with twelve FluidLab Mono fonts, or uses any font file you choose.

Variation

A seed and turbulence give you different takes with the same settings, and they're repeatable.

Detail and speed

Smoke detail finer than the flow grid, sharp advection, and a cache that resumes from the nearest frame. On a Mac the simulation and drawing can also run on the GPU: Metal on a Mac, DirectX 11 on Windows (new).

Setup
  1. Install — run the installer for your system. It needs an administrator password, since After Effects plug-ins live in a shared folder.
  2. Start (or restart) After Effects.
  3. Make a solid the size of your comp, then apply Effect → FluidLab → FluidLab. Smoke starts from the built-in emitter right away.
  4. Choose your layers under Fuel 1–3, Collision, and Burst 1–2. The layers you pick can stay hidden.

The installers aren't signed yet

macOS: if the installer says it can't be opened, right-click it and choose Open. On macOS 15 and later, open System Settings → Privacy & Security instead and click Open Anyway.
Windows: if SmartScreen says it protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway.

The plug-in installs to /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore/FluidLab on macOS and C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\7.0\MediaCore\FluidLab on Windows. To uninstall on macOS, delete that folder; on Windows, use Settings → Apps.

Requirements

After Effects on macOS 12 or later (Apple Silicon or Intel) or 64-bit Windows. Developed and tested on After Effects 2026; earlier versions haven't been tested. The Windows version is newer and has had less testing; its GPU mode (DirectX 11, which needs a GPU with feature level 11.1) is new in 0.1.31. Everything runs locally: no accounts and no network calls.