I have a basic idea of what I want this render to look like, a circular explosion of mercury with some droplets flying around

First off, I'm gonna set up a fluid dynamics sim in houdini

Starting with a sphere.

I'm gonna displace the sphere so it has some interesting normals.

Next, I'll convert the normals of the mesh into velocity for the fluid sim and add the FLIP solver!

Disable gravity and connect the normals' velocity

and we have a fluid sim!

I'm gonna mess with the values until I can render out some decent fluid!

When I'm done, I connect a file node to the render output and render as obj!

I'm now gonna import this into cinema 4d

Let's light this, add some subdivisions and find a good camera angle

I'm gonna use cinema's physical renderer for this.

Let's layout the droplets with spheres,and I'm also adding a floor and a skydome.

Now here's the fun part! materials!

I'm gonna only turn on the reflectance channel, and add a GGX model.

Test render, and we see we need something to reflect...

So I'm gonna assign an hdri to that skydome!

as you can see, this helps a LOT

I'm still not happy with how light this is, so I'm gonna add more contrast by assigning a darker material to the floor.

That's better.

now I'm gonna add depth of field to the image

the orange dots represent the focus distance, and I'm gonna use a reeeeally low f-stop for shallow DOF

like...

.7?

I'm also gonna kick up the contrast on these lights, set sampling to high, and let that render!