Abstract: We present an approach for rendering the surface of a particle-based fluid that is simple to implement, has real-time performance with a configurable speed/quality trade-off, and smoothes the surface to prevent the fluid from looking "blobby" or jelly-like. The method is not based on polygonization and as such circumvents the usual grid artifacts of marching cubes. It only renders the surface where it is visible, and has inherent view-dependent level-of-detail. We use Perlin noise to add detail to the surface of the fluid. All the processing, rendering and shading steps are directly implemented on graphics hardware.