Alright, first of all you should visit this site to get into the right mood: http://rainymood.com/

I recently waxed my car for the summer season. When I put it back in the garage after a slight drizzle, I noticed the nicely shaped droplets on the trunk lid and roof. A quick search revealed that this effect is known as "wax beading" in the car detailing world. Anyway, I wanted to test if I can render this effect.

The goal was to accurately capture the lighting effects inside each droplet, because this is often missing in droplet renders on beverages for example.

Setup is simple: There are 8 different droplets scattered with Forest Pack on a car roof. There is a dome light and a small area light to accentuate the droplets. Rendered with V-Ray. No photon mapped caustics were used, these are purely GI caustics.
There is no post production, only the color correction tools inside the V-Ray Frame Buffer were used for exposure, white balance and contrast.

Here are the results for this quick doodle: