Water drops on brushed steel

[Heinz88]

Dear Community,

I just started to use Keyshot 8 some days ago.
My task is to recreate a foto with water drops on a brushed steel plate.
Until now i didn't find a good tutorial or explanation how to realize that.
My goal is to create something similar to the attached picture.

I'm greatful for any advice, thanks in advance.

Greetings
Heinz

[INNEO_MWo]

There were several very long discussions about water drops on cans. These shows different solutions doing this within KeyShot using displaced meshes like the water glass example from the demo scenes.
Or you can achieve this in post.


Start a little research here, and you'll find tutorials and tips for the goal you like.

[Heinz88]

Dear MWo

Thank you for the advice. My biggest mistake was that i always added the brushed steel texture to "bump" instead of "color", so the optic of it was really bad.
The water drops i put on a thin glass layer and assigned stains to "bump", the result you can see in the picture below.

The next step is to generate a waterjet similar to the fountain in the second attached picture. For me there are two ways to do it:
1) make a cone out of glass -> assign water drops to "bump"
2) make a cone out of glass -> flake geometry (with spheres) -> steer the spread with "color gradient"

Those 2 options both are not perfect to model a waterjet, is there a better way to do it?
I also have an Inventor 3D CAD available.

Thanks in advance.

Greetings
Heinz

[DMerz III]

If you're doing a closeup like the example image, your best bet is going to be modeling the actual geometry of the drops.
Because the brushed steel isn't transparent (like glass) you can have the drops intersecting with the steel plate.

The drops should essentially be a single surface popping through the steel plate. Make that liquid with refraction of 1.334 or similar to mimic water's IOR.

Make sure you render with Global Illumination on and proper ray bounces.

[DMerz III]

Here's an example I put together.

The drops are basically spheres or slightly warped spheres modeled to intersect the 'steel', you can leave the spheres intact here, no need to dissect them or cut them away. This stuff was modeled in Blender.

[Finema]

Hi
Here an example all in keyshot

[Heinz88]

Hey guys

Thank you for your examples.
I now created the rendering below.

I entered two planes to the scene, one from metal with the color "brushed stainless steel" and the second a little bit higher from liquid with the height and opacity maps from Finema. Then i entered a cube and put the geometry "flakes" (spheres) on it, for me it looks like a moisty atmosphere in the room.

I would now like to add some nozzles which generate waterjets to complete the rendering. Which program do you recommend me to model the waterjets with? I found 3D data close to that what i want to do here: https://www.lugher3d.com/free-3d-models/fountain-water-jet

Greetings
Heinz