Maxwell Render | Official public forum

After much consideration i decided to piece together a very simple but hopefully useful tutorial for those of you who wanna make realistic looking clay and Sculpey looking stuff with Maxwell.

Here's how i did it..

Part 1

This claymaterial consists of 3 layers as can be seen in the screenshots below, and the reason to why i went for just this setup with 3 layers and the way they're blended and mixed together is to get as much control as possible over the speculars and the reflections on the claysurface and also to be able to blend and control the bumpmaps and the roughness maps which this material is built on. I'm sure you can get a good looking material without them but i prefer to make it like this.

Also you can add if necessary SSS to the first layer in the material if you wanna have the Sculpey clay look and feel to the mateiral, and tweak the settings further by adjusting the colors to a more mid-pink color.

About lightsetups which works well with this material, i'd say use either some hdri you got or use a simple skydome with color set around 136, 124, 100 or brighter than that. Even grey skydomes works well with this as the colors are all in the mateiral, however the skyome renders possibly faster than the hdri lit enviroment does, then again hdri adds tiny bits of reflection also to your claymodels material. It's more of a personal taste how you do set it up.

This material is quite object dependant which should be said, meaning that the better your object is the better the material will make it look so when you model something which you're gonna clayrender pay attention to your modeling and don't cheat, cheating on the modeling stage will show up once you render it.

Well there's not really that much more to say about this, i believe the pictures below says it all, have fun clay rendering now!

Examples of this clay MXM in action




Clay MXM in the materialeditor


MXM Layers
Layer 1

Layer 2

Layer 3


Download MXM's
Download
http://rapidshare.de/files/30364965/Clay_MXM.rar.html
Temporary Mirror
http://max.is-a-geek.com/MXM/Clay/

Credits for the first clay rendering example goes to anibalin and for his input and feedback as i wrote this tutorial.

/ Max

Thanks very much Max

Thanks alot Max.

But, are you sure the first picture is a render??

Thanks guys! i'm glad you liked it even tho it's kinda sloppy put together..

SunlightRocker: Yeap i'm sure, i think it looks great!

/ Max

Max you're the best

Very nice clay-structure!

Nico: Thanks but i am definately not the best, this is more like newbie stuff which everyone can do with a little bit of time and work put into it.

Polyxo: Thanks i hope the tutorial kinda thingy is of some help.

Perhaps most of you guys don't make these kinda things often, but if you do them.. make them stand out..

/ Max

So realistic.

very nice!!.

really cool

Thanks Tom and Koufax glad you liked it hehe..

I got one more thing coming for you guys tomorrow, it gotta render during
night now.

/ Max

Excellent creation!

Hey Max...not that the others aren't great, but...that first one is just...insane.

Thanks max, its so realistic.

Maximus3D wrote:SunlightRocker: Yeap i'm sure, i think it looks great!

/ Max

Yes, it REALLY does.

Thanks to you all but credits for the first example image should be given to anibalin from this forum because he made it. And he did a very good job!

Last night i put together a part two to this so called tutorial, it's a bit different and has a realworld kinda touch to it. Many of you, especially 8etty might recognise this photorerefence i used hehe..

In this one i attempted to use SSS, but either i did wrong or i had late night stupidity all over me because i can't see any effect it would have in the final rendering.. so i personally think the 3 SSS layers can be dropped and it would render faster and the visual difference wouldn't be visible.

Part 2

Let's start.. below is the reference photo 8etty posted in the original clayrender challenge Chris arranged. I used that as a base to try to as close as possible within one night to match both model and material to the original photo.

Photo Reference


Claydo MXM Layers

Layer 1

Layer 2

Layer 3


Rendered Example


Link to the highres rendering


Download
http://rapidshare.de/files/30556654/Cla ... s.rar.html

Temporary Mirror with textures, MXM's and MXS files
http://max.is-a-geek.com/MXM/Claydo

I hope it's useful, thanks in advance..

/ Max