My favorite ingredients for this one are:
An 8 or 16 frame filmstrip texture of water breaking apart from a big shape into little shapes
A normal map that I can use to distort the UV lookup into each frame of the above animated texture. The normal map itself scrolls continuously, and the intensity of the UV distortion can increase over time, further helping to break apart the shapes as the particle dies, as well as adding cool fluid motion. I also like layering the UV distortion on top of the animated texture, because if you slow the particles down, you won’t notice the frames flipping if they end up less than 30 fps.
Then if you can afford it, i’ll add a normal map too (this one used for lighting not UV distortion). It gets manipulated the same way the diffuse texture would (animated and distorted), but then the normal vector can be used for refraction and/or high frequency highlights by sampling a cube map.
At GDC I think Eben had a cool trick for getting high frequency highlights without using a cube map (maybe it was just sampling a 2D texture), but I need to watch the lecture again and refresh my memory there.
It’s expensive, but if you can get refraction in there as well it really starts to get liquidy!
Sorry i don’t have any shader networks to share. We just use raw HLSL, but for quickly conveying some of this stuff you can’t beat a quick shader network…
Anyway - just my off the cuff thoughts I’m curious what other folks are doing!