Clay renders in Maya [Tutorial]

I.G.88

Clay Rendering in Maya
A Tut By I.G.88 (Ryan Griffeth)

So in this tut im gonna show you some very quick settings in order to do a clay render in maya. It took me quite some time to learn this but i know to show your WIP's it is a invaluable tool so i wanted to share it with the community

Alright first things first boot up maya!



Here i made a Basic Cube just to show what our clay render will look like!


Now we want to load up Mental Ray which is a render eningine within maya itself if you dont have it loaded go to:
Windows>Settings/Prefrences>Plugin Manager

You should now see a window like this


Now make sure Mayatomr.mll is clicked loaded if you want to make sure it loads every time you boot up maya just click Auto load. Now click close!

Now Open up your render settings


You should see a screen that looks like this look @ the drop down menu i have out now and select Mental Ray


Now on the commons Tab scroll down and go to your Render Options area and make sure Enable Default lighting is Unchecked.


Now go to your Indirect Lighting Tab and check Final Gather on.


Basic Final Gathering Attrubiutes
Accuracy: 1000
Point Density: 2.0
Interpolation: 10
(You can Play with these but these seem to do just fine
Ok we are Almost there just hang in with me!

Now open up your Outliner with Window>Outliner You should see something like this:

Click on the persp Camera on the right hand side you should see your settings for this camera scroll down and find the environment tab.

On this tab change your Enviorment color up to a light gray i went about 75% up you can choose a custom color if you want but grayish background seemed to do it for me just fine.

Now lets Render!
i added a extrude to my cube so you can see the effects a bit better.
(your default Lamber texture will work perfectly for clay renders)


Comments and Feedback welcome!
Ryan Griffeth AKA I.G.88