I started this yesterday night. The idea suddenly came to me to make a honey dipper dripping some honey.
I for some reason like the shape of a honey dipper. It's simple, yet intriguing.

Watching a video of someone making a quick honey dipper on a lathe inspired me (I could use more of that!!) to make one myself.
So I modeled this honey dipper as though I were making my own on a lathe. It's something I'd like to own and do one day anyway.
I added maybe a few too many details. You can't even see many of them in this render. Eh, it's fine.

I wanted to use a slightly darker wood to "turn" than something bright like maple. I thought it would interfere with the color of the honey and produce an image that was too bright.
I wanted something like a stained, figured oak at first, but found this highly figured koa instead. I captured / ripped it from a photo to use as a texture. But I have been feeling that perhaps it is too detailed of a wood.
The model was simple enough. Only difficult part was the inside of the main part of the dipper, but that's mostly because of how I modeled it. Now time for the honey.

I used water, or rather, fluid simulation. Most of the time when people use fluid simulation, it's water, so most things are pretty much preset to be like water. But honey is more viscus (thick).
There was a preset for honey to use, but I didn't like it. To me, it was still too runny. I had to do a lot of test simulations to get something close. And even then, when I thought I was done, I had problems.
I kept running into simulation errors, where the simulation would suddenly produce strange results. I tried fiddling with it all night before giving in and coming back later today. It kept me up all last night.
I deleted the simulation setup and rebuilt it. Easy enough, though I had to do that 3 times. Anyway, the next error I ran into was high resolution simulation. It takes a while, but that wasn't it.
When I increased the resolution of the fluid, a kind of final simulation result, the fluid started to act again like water. I had to decrease the gravity just to kind of get it to act like honey again.

I wanted a kind of stringy result of the honey, but this will have to do. Looking at this again, I may re-render it. It seems too dark suddenly. I don't know why that is once I finish rendering things.
I am thinking that maybe I should have used a different wood as well. Maybe I'll go back and edit the image rather than looking for different wood. I think I can re-render tonight. I'll try that.


Hope you guys and gals like. I'll have more stuff soon. Hopefully something much more complex, and much better looking than simple objects.



***EDIT***

I changed the file. This is a re-render. It is brighter, and the honey has been re-simulated. Also brightened the wood.
Still not exactly what I envisioned, but eh, it's alright.

I hope this version looks better than the last.