Droplet

Droplet creates the effect of water droplets on a lens or shot through glass at a close distance.

The idea for this came from an accident while I was messing around with expressions and ST Maps. I got the result below.

Doing one droplet was fine but who needs just one? It could only be useful if there were many droplets like shooting against wet glass or with water on the lens.

Eventually I settled on using a noise pattern to create the droplets and keep things procedural. I kept messing around with it, found a more suiting picture, and got a better result.

The issue I was running into was that the image needs to be reflected in each droplet. I tried tiling but the variation in the size of the droplets made any sort of uniform tiling impossible. I tried playing around with expressions to see if there was a way to isolate each drop but with my time constraints I moved off of it.

I realized that my problems could be solved by using a particle system.

I used a bunch of radials at different sizes for make up the particles. Controls for reflection distortion and edge distortion were run by an ST map after the particle system.

You can also invert the blurring to get an effect similar to lens dirt.

The rest of the controls will be explained in a video that will be coming in the next few days.