Neil Blevins is a very talented 3D artist/animator working for the all-Max special effects house Blur in Venice, California. A regular on the Max forum/web board, he not only donates his time to helping out folks on the forum, but also freely shares many of his techniques. His work is well-known in 3DS Max circles, and can be seen here. A direct link to more of Neil's fine tutorials is here.

Blur's incredible policy of giving away proprietary plugins that were made especially for the company's projects and artists is legendary. You can find this incredible resource (and the plugin mentioned in Neil's tutorial) here.

I thank Neil and Blur for their contributions to this site, and the 3DS community in general.

Make a base material, have on it a medium strength blinn or metal hilight that also has a large base (so you get a large, softish hilight), color it a variation on the color of the material, then turn that material into a shellac material, and place a hilight only material in your second slot, giving it a value of 100-200%. The hilight only should be metal or anisotropic, a really sharp hilight that has a very strong strength.

Then play between the strong small hilight and the large softer colored hilight (play with these values till you get the desired effect) gives it that wet look. If you give your base material a slight bump map, that looks great too (no bump map will make the surface look more like varnish), and the cool thing is the bump will only affect the softer hilight, whereas the bump map will not affect your strong hilight, so the strong hilight really looks like a wet,
liquidy substance over top your regular material.

- Neil Blevins