How to make an object with particles on it looks partially wet

Question

trying to make an object with a material that looks partially wet. like these reference photos.

i've tried using a "wet map" nodes group provided on a blender user's website. unfortunately, the material almost wholly became more shiny or glossy than before using that wet map. i wish the material can have two different characteristics; like different gloss/highlight/reflection, and different IOR perhaps.

any suggestion in the material setup with nodes that we can make for that? plain material without physics simulation to consider, maybe? *pardon my english. not a native speaker.

EDIT:

this what i've got with the fluid sim. and the whole thing get shinier all over it. also, the way the palm sugar syrup is flown on the surface was a bit weird. i wish there's a way i can learn how to achieve this. either with a better fluid sim. and, especially the way we can set the material up in the node editor. even if the model/scene doesn't involve fluid sim.

by the way, there are two parts of the fluid where it's wet on the surface. and they look quite dark as if close to black.

and this is how i made the material setup, using the wet map nodes group provided by planetblender.

Answer 1

Although fluid simulation may be your best bet, here is a way to use dynamic paint to simulate an effect similar to your photo.

To create the dynamic paint effect, I made some blobby "fluid like" meshes to act as dynamic paint brushes. The lupi mesh (and a coconut flake mesh, for the particle system) were the canvas. From right to left: the meshes including the brush objects; the dynamic paint effect on the canvas; the result on the material.

The material on the Lupi is what uses the wetmap as a factor to mix between two principled shaders. One shader, the "wet" shader, has a red tint (varied with a noise texture) and more glossiness via a clearcoat.

Getting the dynamic paint to apply to the coconut particles is more complicated. After the particle system is set up on the Lupi mesh (I used a "hair" type of particle system), it is necessary to apply a Particle Instance modifier to the coconut shreds - otherwise each particle will not act as its own separate Dynamic Paint canvas. As mentioned before, the coconut shred mesh has a Dynamic Paint canvas applied to it.

The coconut particle material is much simpler, it's just got a base color of white (for "dry") and a reddish tint plus a clearcoat (for "wet"), with the wetmap as the factor of a Mix shader.

The above is not a step-by-step but hopefully it provides guidance as to the general technique.