Rendering water droplets

[cash68]

How would I go about creating an image like this?

[andy.engelkemier]

model water droplets.
       There's a trick there though. First, you'll probably want to use a plugin for whatever software you're using. But the real trick is make the water droplet go Through your surface, or not have a back. You want to avoid coincident surfaces, and if you offset the water drops you won't get the right type of refraction. If you have a glass surface, then you'll get the best results if you have the bead just touching it, but delete the back surface.

Don't have anything fancy? Use blender. I'm sure you can find a tutorial on something similar.
If not, an idea would be to have particles generated on the surface randomly, then add a blobmesh to that in order to wrap the particles that are close to eachother. It may not be called that, but hopefully you get the idea.

One more way to make it: create a black and white height map of water droplets that you want. Map that to the surface. Mesh the Hell out of that plane. Use a displacement modifier of some sort to create the geometry on a plane offset Just inside of your object. This will not work well for clear surfaces though. And it's a Ton of geometry. It may be quicker and easier though, depending on what software you're working with.