Wow, thanks for the comments, guys
. A couple more notes:
- Yes, I meant good old TG2 when I said Matt's raytracer
.
- 5 days was a little long, but when you consider all of the complex ray-tracing that had to be done and the fact that I do all of my work on a 1.5 year old Macbook Pro, the time starts to make more sense.
- The distribution was a little complicated. The sphere object wasn't working properly, so I created a sphere in Blender and applied the proper shaders. I then created a distance shader and used that as a color mask on both the droplets and the grass so that I could get a depth mask, and then I created a new camera, slightly higher than the main one and tilted downwards to give a different perspective, and did the same thing. The intersection of the two masks is exactly where in 3D space the droplets should appear, and then I just populate normally.