Ok I have come up with a cool way to displace random water droplets check it out.
This is a simple cube with only a diffuse shader and a little bit of displacement trickery i am working on.
It still needs work so any ideas will be gratefully accepted. love to see some extending of this.
Here’s the node setup it’s pretty straight forward. I’ll explain below.
Ok from left to right
Coordinates are based on the actual object but others work it just takes a little tweaking.
The vector curve simply modifies the stretch on the z axis x and y are as default.
The top musgrave texture is the base then the bottom is side shifted down to give more depth lower and draw the droplet out (to simulate a gravity effect) The multiply x 0.1 was just to make this easier to handle. The factor is important and will vary with the scale and size you are working with.
The two textures are then added this will put the values over 1 so the subtract is just to shift it back into a range to get smooth tops on the drops.
The colour ramp will then define the shape of the droplet so
the black clips it to create the flat plane
the second colour defines the steep curve caused by surface attraction (can’t do undercuts but you can’t really see that anyway).
If you wanted to get technical you could smooth the tops in a more realistic way here.
It would be nice to soften the top of each droplet (ie where the droplet has slid down the surface and the tension is less) and ideas on that would be great.
This is just my first real go at this so there is still heaps to play with.
But it’s pretty simple and looks ok.
I am using 2.78 with Experimental turned on but no subdivision treaks.
Have fun.