Alchemist's Corner - Documentation

01Quick Start

First potion, one click

Tools ▸ Serwus Studio ▸ Cursed Cozy Alchemist ▸ Create Starter Prefabs builds the pack's materials and prefabs and drops a showcase row into the open scene - three potions, a bubbling cauldron with steam, and a standalone vapor emitter. Everything runs in the editor, so you don't even have to press Play. Drag Prefabs/CCAlc_Potion_Round anywhere and you have a glowing potion.

Make it your potion

Select the Liquid child of the bottle. Everything lives on the CCAlc Potion Filler component:

Each bottle is its own potion even though they all share one material - the component writes per-instance values, so no material duplicates pile up.

Make it move

Slosh is already on. Grab a bottle in the Scene view and drag it: the surface leans into the movement, overshoots, rocks back level, and the ripples keep churning for a few seconds afterwards. Spinning the bottle stirs it too. The component's Slosh Readout meters show tilt, agitation and speed live - a slow glide barely lifts them, a sharp flick spikes them.

Not dramatic enough? Two knobs, in this order: material → Waves → Wave Height and Wave Boost When Stirred; then component → Slosh → Tilt per G up and Damping down.

Steam over the neck

Drop Prefabs/CCAlc_Vapor_Steam at the bottle's mouth. On the CCAlc Vapor Emitter pick a Preset - Steam, Smoke or MagicHaze - tweak Density / Speed / Tint, then right-click → Apply Preset.

Using your own bottle model

1. Model it as two meshes: an outer shell and a slightly smaller inner liquid mesh (or duplicate the shell and scale it inward ~5%). The liquid mesh must be closed - the shader uses its back faces as the liquid's top surface.
2. Shell → M_CCAlc_Glass. Inner → M_CCAlc_Liquid.
3. Add CCAlc Potion Filler to the inner object.
4. Set Top Margin so a full potion sits under the neck.
5. Leave Batching Static off on the liquid mesh.

The fill range is read from the mesh bounds automatically.

02Shaders

Liquid and Cauldron share property names (_LiquidColor, _DeepColor, _EmissionColor, _EmissionStrength, _BubbleAmount) so one Potion Filler recolours either.

Glass (Stylized) is the same implementation as the glass in Cursed Cozy Alley - copied in rather than referenced, so this pack still exports standalone. Closed bottle shells want Cull = Back; flat panes can use Off.

Bottle setup

1. Model the bottle as two meshes: an outer shell and a slightly smaller inner liquid mesh. The liquid mesh should be closed.
2. Shell → material with Glass (Stylized). Inner → material with Liquid (Fill + Bubbles).
3. Add CCAlc Potion Filler to the inner liquid object and set fill, colour and glow. The glass draws over the liquid automatically (transparent queue after opaque).

Cauldron setup

1. A flat disc mesh for the brew surface, UV-unwrapped 0..1. Material → Cauldron (Bubbling Brew).
2. Optionally add CCAlc Potion Filler to recolour it from the same palette.

03How the fill works

_FillLevel (0..1) is mapped into the mesh's own object-space Y range (_FillMinOS .. _FillMaxOS, written by the Potion Filler from the mesh bounds). The shader rebuilds the cutting plane from the object matrix every frame, so a bottle can be moved, parented to a hand, thrown or animated at zero per-frame script cost - the potion goes with it.

Fill Space - a switch on the material, also reachable from the Potion Filler inspector - decides how that plane is oriented:

The top surface

The liquid mesh renders double sided (Cull Off). Back faces are only ever visible through the hole the fill plane cuts, so the shader shades them as the flat top of the liquid: the view ray is walked back up to the plane, and the result is shaded with the plane's normal, the surface colour and foam ripples. That is what stops you from seeing straight through the bottle when looking down at it.

_SurfaceDepthTint lets a little of the volume below bleed through the top, so it reads as depth rather than a painted lid.

04Foam and waves

The foam is a band positioned along Y, independent of everything else:

Both also sample at the shared _ProjectionScale, so the pattern keeps the same feature size as it carries over the rim instead of changing density there. On the walls the horizontal coordinate wraps around the bottle and the vertical one is the depth below the surface - measured in the same units, so the pattern keeps its aspect ratio and stays anchored to the surface, riding the waves with it.

To make the top read as strongly as the band, raise Top Foam Amount (_SurfaceRipple). Procedural Ripple Tiling only affects the fallback noise used when there is no foam texture, or when raggedness is below 1.

Waves

Three crossing sines are added to the cut plane itself, so the line where the liquid meets the glass undulates instead of being a ruler-straight edge; the top surface tips its normal along the wave slope and gathers foam on the crests, so the whole top visibly travels. _WaveHeight (metres), _WaveScale and _WaveSpeed shape the resting state; height 0 gives a dead-flat surface back.

05The motion model

Turn on Slosh on the Potion Filler and CCAlcSloshSimulator turns the transform's movement into two signals that read differently on screen.

A transform's position is quantised to frames, so differentiating it twice gives a spike train, not an acceleration - dragging an object produces frames with no movement next to frames with a big jump. Clamp that and every motion saturates: a slow glide and a sharp flick come out identical. The simulator therefore:

• filters velocity and acceleration with frame-rate independent exponential time constants before deriving anything (Responsiveness sets them: low is heavy and ignores jitter, high is twitchy);
• uses soft saturation instead of clamping, so small inputs stay proportionally small and large ones roll off toward the ceiling;
• drives tilt from acceleration (a constant-velocity glide does not tip a real surface) and agitation mostly from jerk - how suddenly the motion changes, which is exactly the „was that a flick or a drift" measure;
• integrates the spring semi-implicitly with sub-steps, so a stiff setting stays stable when the frame rate drops instead of exploding.

Measured response, same 60 fps rig, distance and duration varied:

Tilt - Tilt per G is the main „how dramatic" knob (how far it leans at 1 g), Frequency how fast it rocks, and Damping is the „it stops too soon" knob - drop it toward 0.02 and the surface rocks for many seconds; push it to 1 and it stops dead like syrup. Max Tilt bounds the target; the spring may overshoot it by up to 50%, which is the wobble, with a hard backstop above that.

Agitation - a 0..1 energy that spikes on jerk, plain speed and spinning the bottle, then decays on its own clock. It multiplies the wave height through _SloshWaveBoost. Agitation Decay is how many seconds the ripples outlive the movement; Agitation Idle holds a permanent simmer.

Slosh needs World fill space (in Local the surface is welded to the mesh, so there is nothing to tilt) and costs one small property-block write per frame. The Potion Filler inspector shows live meters for tilt, agitation and speed - drag a bottle around and watch them separate.

06Texture slots and mapping

All four slots are optional and keyword-gated - an empty slot costs nothing and the shader keeps its fully procedural look. Drop a texture into the material inspector and the slot switches itself on. Each slot lives in the section it belongs to - the bubble texture under Bubbles, foam under Surface & Foam - together with its own tiling, strength and scroll.

Mapping. By default the shader projects textures in object space (a diagonal XZ → U, Y → V projection): seam free, needs no UV unwrap, works on any bottle, and moves with the object instead of swimming through world space. _ProjectionScale sets the base density, then each slot has its own tiling and offset. Tick Use Mesh UVs if you have authored UVs you would rather use. The top surface always uses a flat top-down projection, since a surface is planar by definition.

07Components

Menu: Component ▸ Serwus Studio ▸ Cursed Cozy Alchemist ▸ …

CCAlc Potion Filler

Per-instance potion via MaterialPropertyBlock - no extra materials.

• Fill Level 0..1, pushed together with the mesh's object-space range.
• Top / Bottom Margin (metres) trims the usable range so a full potion sits under the neck instead of at the very top vertex.
• Slosh - motion model settings (World fill space only), plus live meters for tilt / agitation / speed.
• Colours, Emission (HDR) and Bubble Amount.
• The inspector shows the resolved fill range and the material's Fill Space (with a switch), and warns about static batching.
• Right-click → Randomize Potion (witch green, arcane purple, blood red, mana blue, sickly yellow, ember orange), or call SetPotion(i) from code.

With Slosh off there is no per-frame cost at all: the component only writes when something changes, because the shader derives the fill plane from the transform itself. With Slosh on it writes one vector per frame.

CCAlc Vapor Emitter

Configures the attached ParticleSystem from a preset - Steam, Smoke or MagicHaze - so you get rising vapor without hand-tuning modules. Assign a soft puff particle material, pick a preset, tweak Density / Speed / Tint, then right-click → Apply Preset. Place it over a bottle neck or cauldron mouth.

Scripting API

// zmiana mikstury z palety (0..5)
var filler = potion.GetComponentInChildren<CCAlcPotionFiller>();
filler.SetPotion(2);

// smooth bottle emptying
filler.FillLevel = Mathf.Lerp(filler.FillLevel, 0f, Time.deltaTime);

08Property reference

09Troubleshooting

Cross-pack backbone

Same series toon look as Alley and Vegetation - half-Lambert stepped main light, tinted shadow, soft additional lights - so lanterns read cosy on glass and brews. The shared includes CCAlc_Lighting.hlsl and CCAlc_Noise.hlsl must ship with the package.