EffectForge [Beta]

Forge animated effects. Preview them live. Export them to your game.

effect-forge is a desktop VFX creation tool for indie game developers, pixel artists, and small teams. Build fluid simulations, looping pixel-art fire, or animated sprite effects through a focused visual editor—then export the result as a trimmed PNG spritesheet with JSON metadata.

This is an early beta. The core creation and export workflows are working, and your feedback will help shape the interface, presets, performance, and next modules.

What you can create

• Smoke plumes, dust clouds, fire, explosions, blood-like splashes, and magical effects.
• Looping pixel-art flames with custom color bands, scale, flicker, distortion, and shape masks.
• Impact rings, circles, squares, whirls, smoke forms, and custom-shaped emission.
• Animated sprite reactions such as squash, stretch, shake, rotation, skew, flash, tint, outline, and dissolve.
• Trimmed spritesheets ready to import into your game workflow.

Three focused workflows

Fluid

Start from the included Blood, Dust, Explosion, Fire, Magic, or Smoke presets. Tune the simulation, change colors, place multiple emitters, adjust force and timing, and choose a shape for each emitter. The simulation runs on the GPU so you can iterate in the live preview.

The built-in shape library includes circles, impacts, smoke masks, squares, and whirls. You can also load your own monochrome texture as an emitter shape or material source.

Pixel Fire

Create crisp, looping pixel-art flames without drawing every frame by hand. Edit the palette bands and thresholds, choose a source shape, control the pixel scale and motion, then preview the complete animation before export.

Volumetric

Create GPU-simulated 3D fire, smoke, and explosions from the Campfire, Smoke Plume, Explosion, and Fireball presets. Use the Emitters tab to add sources and edit their 3D position, sphere or box shape, velocity, fuel, temperature, smoke, timing, and blast pressure.

Orbit the camera, move the preview light, and position analytic colliders. Tune fire-color gradients, self-shadowing, scattering, curl noise, and flame-front shredding, with an optional retro rendering quality setting.

Export the chosen camera view as a 2D spritesheet, or export the volume itself as tiled PNG/EXR slice atlases for 3D textures and OpenVDB density and flames grids for tools such as Blender or Houdini. Atlas and VDB exports support single frames and numbered sequences, with raw or styled volume fields.

Animate parameters over time

Fluid and Volumetric timelines support linear and stepped keys for animatable controls, including emitter strength, color, forces, smoke, camera, and rendering settings. Search for parameters, edit selected keys, and scrub the animation. Simulations replay when needed so the preview follows the same parameter animation used for export.

How it works

1. Choose a Fluid, Pixel Fire, or Volumetric starting point.
2. Adjust the effect, palette, emitters, canvas, timing, and parameter keyframes.
3. Play or scrub the preview; pan and zoom when you need a closer look.
4. Export a fixed-cell PNG spritesheet and JSON metadata, a GIF, or a 3D volume in a supported format.

Exports are deterministic: the same preset and settings produce the same result, which makes iteration and versioning predictable.

Included in this beta

• Fluid simulation with water, lava, and expanded liquid presets.
• Procedural Pixel Fire render mode.
• Volumetric fire, smoke, and explosions with in-editor 3D emitters.
• Fluid and Volumetric parameter animation timelines.
• Orbit camera, light and collider overlays, ground and axis guides.
• Emitter shape browser with bundled circles, impacts, smoke, squares, and whirls.
• Live animation preview.
• Frame count, FPS, column, pixelation, and supported looping controls; fixed square frame sizes from 16 to 512 pixels.
• PNG spritesheets with JSON metadata and GIF export for Fluid and Volumetric effects.
• PNG/EXR volume slice atlases and OpenVDB export, including numbered sequences.
• Windows x86_64 and Linux x86_64 builds.

Beta notes and requirements

• A Vulkan-capable GPU is required.
• Windows 10/11 64-bit or a modern 64-bit Linux desktop is recommended.
• macOS is not included in this beta.
• The interface and presets are still evolving, and compatibility issues may remain on some GPU/driver combinations.
• Please keep copies of presets and exported work while testing beta builds.

Linux installation

Extract the download and run

Windows installation

Extract the download and run effect-forge.exe. Windows may show a security prompt for an unsigned beta build.

Help improve effect-forge

If something breaks—or if a workflow feels harder than it should—please send feedback to EMAIL Include your operating system, GPU model, what you expected, what happened, and the steps needed to reproduce it.

Screenshots and exported examples are especially useful. I would also love to see the effects you create.

Developed by [Delirium Forge Studio].