Making a Clay Render

Clay render is used to show the details of any model you create in any 3D application. One of the best plugins for clay render is Brazil R/S for 3D Studio MAX, but such a plugin will cost you alot of cash. This simple tutorail will show you how to create a "clay rander" using your default 3D Studio MAX rendering engine without spending any extra cash for any extra plugins.

Clay Render with Defualt Render Engine Of 3D Max

Get your model done

You will need some models (poly/mesh) in the scene before making any render. I have modeled a 3D logo for our lovely website Oman3D. If you would like to try our tutorails with the same 3D logo then you can download the 3DS file from this link.

Add skylight

After getting the logo in scene, add the skylight:
1- Create panel > Lights > Standard > Skylight Button

2- Create menu > Lights > Skylight

note: The position of the skylight and its distance from objects (in our example the logo) has no effect.

The skylight paprameter rollout.
Multiplier: is the skylight attribute and 1.0 is the default value. If you set higher value, the skylight get more brighter and vice versa. What you have to do is check the "On" checkbox.
Sky Color: Sky color is the color of the sky or environmet. Set the color value to "white" by clicking in the color box.

The Skylight Parameters Panel

Enable Light Tracer

The skylight won't have an effect on the rendering scene if you did no t enable the Light Tracer. To enable the Light Tracer go to Rendering > Advanced Lighting > Light Tracer. Select the Advanced Lighting as "Light Tracer" and make sure it is "Active".

Advanced Lighting Tab, Light Tracer is active.

Note: Using Skylight and Light Tracer will make your rendering process slow, to make it accelerate it change the value of Rays/Samples to a lower value in Light Tracer parameter. However, using a lower value lowers the quality of the image, this method is good for testing to see the output before making the final render.

Closing the window makes you almost ready to make the clay render, the only stepleft is applying the material to the objects used.

Applying the Materials

Press the letter M on your keyboard to open up the Material Editor. Select the first slot and scroll down to "Blinn Basic Parameters" , click the box next to Diffuse to open up the color Selector. Clay reneders require a brown color, to get that colour set Red to 218, Green to 197, and Blue to 178. Close the window now and name the material Clay. You can save it to Max library to be able to reuse it in other projects..

Material Editor

Now select the objects in the scene that you want to render as clay. Open the Material Editor and select the clay material slot and assign the matrial to selection.

The Render

You are now ready to make the render, click render and hopefully you will be getting an output similar to this one.

Clay Render with Skylight

Clay Render without Skylight

If you are not satisified with the outcome you can change the Skylight Multiplier value and the render view as well.