In the previous works, the real-time fluid-character animation could hardly be achieved because of the intensive processing demand on the character's movement and fluid simulation. This paper presents an effective approach to the real-time generation of the fluid flow driven by the motion of a character in full 3D space, based on smoothed-particle hydrodynamics method. The novel method of conducting and constraining the fluid particles by the geometric properties of the character motion trajectory is introduced. Furthermore, the optimized algorithms of particle searching and rendering are proposed, by taking advantage of the graphics processing unit parallelization. Consequently, both simulation and rendering of the 3D liquid effects with realistic character interactions can be implemented by our framework and performed in real-time on a conventional PC. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.