are going to say "oh, no, not another damm car render!" but bear with me, and I might be able to explain it 
While I was rendering my alien moon entry we've had a few rainy days here, which is rare. In my home town most days rain, the rest pours, but here in Madrid the sun is always shining no matter the weather outside, and after a while that gets to my nerves. I do miss the rain. So that got me thinking, I love those rainy days, they create some special mood, intimate, that I thought it would be neat to try to recreate.
First I needed something to rain on, I thought about everything, but hey what about a lonely car sitting out there in an alley, and if that car was a classic it might help to recreate that nostalgic feeling I get on rainy days. I went out to fish the net for a car, I like modeling all type of stuff, but cars are not one of those, besides there is plenty of people who do a better job at it. Finally I found what I was looking for here, http://www.archibase.net/download/8821.html a nice car model by Scott Brown, it was a single mesh so I had to work a little in the materials, but that was fast. Then I created a simple box to be my alley and started playing with particles to create the rain. Of course I wanted to do it the more accurate posible, so I modeled a simple 3d rain drop and instanced it in the particle sistem. It look good in octane, but with hardly 6000 drops the polygon count was up the roof, and it hardly look like a summer shower, so that didn't cut it. Also because there is no motion blur yet, the drops look frozen in midair, which is ok, but not quite what I wanted to show. So I thought, how about if I hand paint a drop and use a plane for each one, that way the poly count would go lower and I could simulate motion blur in one go. Well, when I first imported it in octane it looked fantastic (for my standards at least ) so I started to play with the drop materials till I was pleased. I was going to create a texture for the rain ripples in the water when I luckly stumbled upon this "rainmaker" in this great tutorial http://www.3d-palace.com/xenomorphic/ed ... ipples.htm, not only that I remembered reading this other tutorial http://www.rendreal.com/archives/583 where I got the way of faking the rain drops in the car windows, then I just had to do an easy unwrap on the car and hand paint some masks for the water and mix it with the other ones. For the alley I took a walk in cgtextures.com, of course, and chose 2 nice old building one and played with them to create bump and reflection maps to go along. All set and my first tests really were more than I was expecting. I showed it to my girl, and she said, "sure, fine, but it needs an old poster in the wall", so again I went out to hunt some posters, I found them here http://www.lapl.org/virgal/travel/travel-1.html in L.A.'s public library. I like the idea and added 2, one for the wall and one for the floor.
Well now with a 420k triangles and over 200k rain drops it was time to render. The images have been cooked for 4000 samples for about 4 hours @2048x1024 except #5 that was 3600 for 6 hours @2048x2048.
I like how they got out of octane so there is NO retouching whatsoever, just added the logo and converted them to jpg.
Hope you like them, I'm proud of them
