If you're keeping up with this long winded development process, you will see where this fits in. This sequence combines volumetrics, a particle system, a fake liquid gold sim and some booleans. Interestingly, these frames only took 13 seconds each to render in Cycles in Blender. I only have a 1080 ti. But I do have 64 GB of ram. I think ram makes a huge difference to Blender.
Really looking forward to seeing more of this animation coming together. I reckon we are looking at something around 45 seconds to a minute.