Especially last month, for some reason. So I decided to make a super quick showcase of the workflow.
Now, for sure, there are lot's of different methods on how to get those drops, it's just depends on time you have, accuracy of the result and probably desired look.
It was really hard to resist from trying out Maxwell's new geometry scatter tool to spread out those drops across the surface. I think it is also could give you quite good results. However - I wanted to have a little bit more control over the placement, shape and surface tension. Yeah surface tension in real flow does magic.
So what I did first is re-mapped the heart itself in Maya, that way that front unfolded side covers entire 0 to 1 space (As from the beginning I knew - I won't need the back side) - so I brought Maya's UV snapshot to Photoshop, and painted different drops where eI wanted them to appear. The trick here is the brightness. So the brighter your spot - the more particles will be generated there. And for sure you can define by yourself the approximate shape (like I did with the letters) and size and "thickness". Afterwards I brought triangulated mesh into Realflow and created object emitter. Trick here is to assign texture to the object and on emitters properties you also need to assign texture to "speed" node. So that way emitter will emit particles based on black and white values from your texture. And it looks cool they way it works … like I said - magic .. so you'll need couple of daemons to kill the speed of those particles so they'll not fly away from the object, and to maintain fairly high surface tension so that particles will form more natural "drop-like" shapes, rather then strictly following "circles" from texture. After I done my mesh - I brought it back to Maya for shading and lighting. Well materials are simple (if not primitive) and lighting in HDRLS - is simply a pleasure. So, I've used Maxwell Render to render everything with additional channels (z-depth and custom alpha for liquid). After rendering I took everything into After Effects (simply because I like it more than PS) and .. well .. nothing fancy, just combined everything together. That's it. It took me a bit less than 4 hours of my personal time, excluding rendering stage, as it was done during night. Most of the time I was playing with liquid sim in RealFlow and with lighting in HDRLS (so cool).
Now about the look, yeah - I know - not that realistic, but hey - invest a little more time in each stage and I bet you could get very good results.
Check out the images in the Gallery