Storm HydroFX is a standalone, GPU-accelerated FLIP fluid simulator built by Sebastian Schäfer and the Storm VFX team. It has been released as a free open beta and is intended to give artists a lean, focused tool for liquid simulation without the overhead of full multiphysics suites. Unlike the full Storm package, HydroFX includes only the FLIP solver — no granular, cloth or smoke modules — and is designed to be node-free for simplicity. The user interface is modelled after the existing Storm interface to ease adoption. HydroFX is currently an offline simulator rather than a real-time playback system. Future versions are expected to include performance improvements.
Supported I/O, geometry, and formats
HydroFX allows import of geometry in Alembic (.abc) and OBJ (.obj) formats, which can act as emitters, colliders or force drivers. For output, HydroFX supports particle caches in Alembic (.abc), USD (.usd) and PRT (.prt) formats, along with OpenVDB (.vdb) surfacing for mesh or volume previews. This means simulations can be moved easily into DCC or rendering tools such as Maya, Blender, 3ds Max or Unreal Engine. In the current beta, there are no restrictions on import, export or scene saving — all features are unlocked.
Technical and performance details
HydroFX runs on Windows only and requires an NVIDIA GPU, with the oldest tested card being a GeForce 1080. One of its key optimisations is the use of an adaptive domain, restricting simulation to active regions and saving memory and compute time on empty areas. In community tests, HydroFX has reached around 100 million particles per frame across a 500-frame wave simulation, exporting velocity, vorticity and signed distance fields. The solver includes a position-based dynamics whitewater model with foam clumping and drag forces, producing more realistic splash motion. Because it computes only active regions, HydroFX avoids wasted calculation on empty voxels, which benefits large or sparse simulations.
Installation and licensing
HydroFX is distributed as a ZIP archive. The user extracts the files manually and launches the executable — no installer wizard is provided. The Microsoft Visual C++ runtime (VC Redist x64) must be installed beforehand. During the beta, a live internet connection is required at launch to obtain a temporary licence. The beta is free of charge and fully functional with no feature restrictions. No registration is required to download the software. Support is currently provided via the official Discord and user community.
Strengths, limitations, and roadmap
Strengths
HydroFX focuses on one simulation type — FLIP fluids — reducing complexity for artists. It includes full import and export options (Alembic, USD, PRT, VDB) and offers GPU acceleration with adaptive domain handling for performance gains in sparse scenes. The beta version unlocks all features for unrestricted testing.
Limitations and caveats
HydroFX runs only on Windows and NVIDIA GPUs. It performs offline simulation, not real-time playback, and has limited documentation. It lacks the broader physics modules of the full Storm suite and its stability under production loads remains to be proven.
Planned features
Future updates are expected to include spray and emission simulation, performance improvements and possibly interactive simulation capability.
Test before production
As with any beta software, users should test HydroFX thoroughly before relying on it for production work. The open beta is an opportunity to evaluate its GPU performance, workflow simplicity and integration potential without cost or licensing constraints.
