Not exactly; UE3 only made use of signed distance fields as a way to store shadowmaps. But that is storing the distance fields as 2d surface like lightmaps. The difference being that instead of storing the light value at each pixel you store the nearest distance to the shadow. The look and limitations of the two methods though is very similar. UE4 still has that same method for stationary directional lights. DFAO stuff uses 3d distance fields (which is the same 3d distance fields being used in this thread).
Technically UE3 also briefly had svogi which is voxelized representation of the world, but it was never released or shown outside of the ue4 version that was temporarily used for the original Elemental Demo. But svogi is very different than distance fields even though some of the uses are similar.
You could achieve a similar effect before using translucency by getting normals from the scene but that version has terrible artifacts since the fluid will not bend ‘around’ a pole, you only see it influenced where the pole’s depths are rendered. But that basic idea is how we typically did water foam edges etc, or the imulsion glowing edges in gears of war.