How to create clay renders like a pro

hello everyone and sorry sorry sorry for this camera right here in case you're out of the loop I got hurt this last week I broke my leg and I've been trying to re accommodate my stuff here on the studio so that I can work comfortably and unfortunately my my wife my family they're not here all the time to help me and I really want to start recording so it's just going to be this video with this weird camera angle but today I'm going to show you how to do this we're going to go and cover all of the important things that you need to understand to generate a very nice looking clay render and it's not your typical clay render with just a simple material we're going to be doing a couple of things and a couple of like movements here inside of Maya so that you can get a very nice result at the end so if this is something that you want to learn let's go very well my friends so let's start with this setup here for our character this is a character I did so long ago I think it was like 10 or 12 years ago I don't know it's been a long long time it was one of my first sort of like models as a student so I think it really helps because it's going to show you how you can turn something that looks relatively simple which is just this character right here here into a nice render that show cases that you know how to present your work work so what we're going to do here is first of all we're going to create this infinite background infinite backgrounds are really really good because they allow you to have a very soft background on your character without the need to um to do this in postproduction with just like a like a paint layer or something it's it's just it's CG it's going to be part of the scene and it's going to receive light very naturally from all of the different elements that we're going to be using now of course as I've mentioned before one of the things that you're going to need is an hdri so we're going to be using poly Haven go away Adobe there we go so poly Haven is the best place to get hdis and here's my first piece of advice when you're doing clay renders you never want to go with an HDR that has a very harsh Shadow such as this one's right here it's definitely a nogo why because it's going to be very difficult to control and you're going to get these very harsh Shadows on your objects that are just don't look as nice I always recomend going for this or like soft elements soft lights that are going to give you a nice result if you go to the studio section you're going to find a lot of very cool ones I'm going to be using this one the blue photo studio which I really like so we're going to go to Arnold lights and we're going to go skydom light over on this side under color information we're going to of course plug in our file everything should be pointing to your project files and we're going to hit open and there we go now cameras rendering camera panels look through selected and we talked about this on the last short if you're not watching our shorts there's a couple of like cool tidbits of information right there so uh one of the things that I was mentioning is that for a character portrait you usually want to go for something that's a little bit flatter so instead of a 35 I'm going to go for like a 65 mm so it's going to give me a very nice sort like zoom in here for the character and it's going to allow me to see the whole thing if I want to see something a little bit more heroic we can go all the way down to 24 we're going to be seeing all the character but as you can see it's a again since it's just a very slim sort of like thin character there's a lot of empty space composition wise so for this kind of stuff I always recommend pushing in on your characters and then if we want to do another kind of like a rander later on we can do it now I don't always like like completely flat elements I always like to do even like a little bit of a tilt down or like a tilt up depending on what kind of character you're going for usually if your camera is positioning a little bit lower you're going to get this effect where uh what's the word where you look smaller so the character looks more heroic and the other way around if the camera is up here you are more heroic than the character and you get this sort like different perspective well I'm going to go a little bit lower like right around there I think that one's going to look fine now don't be this is very important don't be scared of making sure that certain elements on your scene are not visible people always like and I see this all the time in portfolios they'll rather have a render like this where I can't really see anything on the character because it's so small just so that you show everything rather than go in there and show me some of the details on for instance the portrait of the character so don't be afraid to push in on your character even if some parts are going to be clipped out you can later on do other kinds of renders other different parts of the character and that's fine in a movie in a game you're not going to be seeing your character in full screen all the time seeing every single detail there's going to be lights there's going to be shadows there's going to be composition shots and and things like that that are going to make it difficult to see so so get rid of that fear of not showing everything in your character that's very very important so now that we have this we can do our first test and I'm going to go here to the render R renderer going to change the system to GPU and let's change this to full HD depending on your system you might want to start with smaller sizes or smaller um resolutions and then jump into uh bigger elements so in this case we're going again full HD and a GPU to get a faster render for a single image GPU is really good if you're going to be doing an animation and you want to avoid that sort of like flickering thing you might want to try using CPU or GPU but with higher sampling count because otherwise it's just not going to look good so there you go look at this just by having a nice hdri and we already have something that looks quite quite nice so that's the first thing just get a basic light in there and and we're good to go to the next stage the next stage is going to be the materials and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring I'm going to give the background material and Arnold AI standard surface Shader and this one's going to be a dark Shader with a high roughness why do I want a dark background well the reason is the character should be the main focus of our scene so if we make the background dark what we're going to do once we add a lighter material to the character is we're going to make the character pop some people like to have more Valance approach you can try again play around with maybe a light backg in a dark character it's a very very interesting things that you can do right there but it's important that there's always a little bit of contrast so that you can really see the silhouette of whatever it is you're modeling so in this case that one looks good now I'm going to go to the character I'm going to right click and assign new material Arnold AI standard surface and this is going to be of course my clay material so I'm going to write M clay clay clay there we go so what everyone usually does is they'll go here to the color they'll add a little bit of a base color to the whole thing depending on what kind of clay they want to go for and they're going to play with the roughness to generate again a sort of like clay looking material which is going to look like this and this is not bad this is a definitely a good way to do it it's a good starting point however again I'm going to show you a couple of extra tricks here to make this thing look even nicer first of all we're actually not going to use color we're going to use some surface yes this is going to be a little bit more expensive but it's going to look a lot cooler so On th of surface color I'm going to grab the same color that we had before probably going to make it a little bit lighter so right around there and if we render by default the sub surface might be way too intense and this is because of the scale radius that we have right here so the scale is the scale that our object is currently at and I believe I did not model this one at real world scale so therefore it's kind of like small figure and since it's made out of wax or this of surface material light is going through the material very very intensely so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to reduce the scale to something like 0.1 and as you can see we're getting back a lot more of the detail and we still get a little bit of that nice sort of like surfacey feel to the whole thing it is definitely more noisy so I'm going to have to go to the render settings onor render I'm going to use adaptive sampling here I'm going to set this to like eight samples eight samples at this point I think should be good enough for what we're going for we're still going to be using a d noiser uh very very soon so it's just one of the things that we can do but yeah there you go I still think it's a little bit on the high side so instead of 0.1 I'm going to say 05 05 there we go so that way we don't have too much sub surface but just enough so that the material looks a little bit more interesting so instead of having this very plain sort of like flat plastic look with just an orange beige material we get this which is again way way way more complex way way more interesting so once we have this uh we can of course turn on the denoiser I'm going to go here denoiser Optics is usually the one that I use and as long as you let this run for a couple of seconds here a couple of minutes you're going to see how all of the details come back to the to the character all of those section lines and things and you get a very smooth surface across the whole character now that is the I would say first step to get something that looks a lot nicer so you can like you can immediately see right just from going from like a viport thing to to a more like Advanced render right now it don't really looks quite quite nice but this I would say is just the first step to getting something that looks even nicer so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go back to the material and I'm going to change the radius from white to Red what this will do is instead of having a sort of like white surface glow right here what's going to happen is we're going to have a redive surfacey color so I personally like to add a little bit of you know pigment a little bit of color to certain elements so we get this yes it's going to look a little bit more noisy because it's going to filter out some of the other elements but as soon as the samples go high enough and you're using the D noiser all of that thing goes away and you're going to get this very nice look at that very very nice red or like Halo going around the thin areas of your character so I think this this really like it works very well and it gives us a more natural look to the whole thing so again part one of the of the lesson is right here we're not going to stop the video I'm going to keep going but um I just wanted you guys to understand that this will be my first step whenever I'm setting up a render make sure that I have something that looks nice on the material now we're going to jump back into the lights we need to do a little bit of tweaking here with the lights now I normally don't like my HDR to be my main light in this particular case it's actually not that bad like I really like how this one is working work so I'm going to make an exception here and I'm going to leave this as my main light and as you can see we have this very cold light coming from the left in this case but I do think it's a little bit Overexposed so I'm going to go to the exposure I'm going to set this to minus one minus one should bring the exposure down but not like intensely enough that we lose all of that stuff as you can see this is a little bit more like nicely exposed I would say um I think it's a little bit too much so I'm going to say minus5 so like a little bit of an in between right there so we got a a little bit of a higher highlight right there and there we go I personally like having contrast between lights and shadows some people like to have this very sort of like pastel looking effect Hollywood has been doing this a lot in movies and series lately where everything's very sort of like dark and very grayish um again this is up to you where you want things to be but I think something like this looks good however as you can see one of the issues that we're going to have right now is that the shadow area is very dark we're getting very like intense Shadows again some people might like this I usually like to have my scenes well lit so I'm going to go Arnold lights area light and if my HDR is working as my key light then this light right here is going to work as my feel light okay which is going to feel that's the that's why it has that name it's going to feel all of this uh dark areas so that we don't have as much Shadow as what we have right now so on this one I'm going to set the exposure I'm guessing something like 10 for now to start and let's give the shot and there we go so it's not really doing too too much might need to push this to like 14 I think 14 is going to be a little bit too much there we go that's a little bit better but you can see how now the Shadows on this side are not as intense here's a trick one of the things you can do is change the color to a very obvious color like this pink and it's going to be a lot easier to see where the influence of this light is working you can also turn on off all of the other lights and just see this isolated but I like to change the color just to see this and in this particular case even like that looks interesting so we might want to do something like a sort of like warming well it's not warm it's like a like a cool pink color here as my feel light so this becomes a warm feel light for my character and now again thanks to this light that we have right here the Shadows on this side are not as intense and everything looks a little bit nicer finally the last Light that we're going to need is of course what we know as the rim light so I'm going to bring this one over here and this one is usually opposed to the main light usually not always you can actually have multiple ones I'm going to show you how to do that and uh this one what it will do is it will generate a rim light on the borders of the elements and this one should be a little bit more exposed I'm going to go all the way to 17 and you can see how we start getting this like very nice shine on the borders of the character feel like that's too intense so I'm going to bring it a little bit further back like right around there and there we go I just want like the very little border right there of course I'm going to change the color as well in this case I'm going to go with like a bluish color and that way blue and pink might get something interesting if you want to use color you can also turn that off and then use temperature and I can make this a cool light here with the temperature and it's going to look a little bit more balanc but look at how nice that Rim light looks and remember the important part of the rim light is that it separates the character from the background so now we get even more like separation not only in color right because this is a dark background and a light character but also in um in this R light that's literally cutting out the character from the background and again don't stop here guys like if you want to add more lights you guys would not believe how many lights you can find on a TV studio or in a movie set just it's it's ridiculous that's why movies look so cool because there's so much Direction in where and how lights are placed so that you get the best possible results something that you're not just going to go outside shoot with your camera and get that precise result everything's orchestrated to get the best possible result so as you can see here I had a secondary Rim light and now we get this very nice R light here on this side of the character exposing again a little bit more of the of the overall thing however this one this second one that I added is adding a little bit to the exposure of this side so I might bring this down to like I don't know like a 15 or something now the next thing that we can do here once we have a cool light setup and again you can play with this as much as you want another thing you can do is grab your hdri and just move it around a little bit maybe push this for instance a little bit more to the left of the character and that way we're going to get a little bit more of a shadow here on the front and it might pop a little bit more so there's there's no way you're going to find the perfect shot unless you experiment and try to find a a good solution here now it one of the things that I see frequently with Clay renders is that people don't add any variation to the clay um materials and something that is very very easy to do is go to the hypers shade or to whatever other software you're using here grab your material and the case of Maya we're going to say edit and then a duplicate there we go duplicate shading Network and this I'm to call Clay dark and the only thing I need to do is go to the subsurface element go to the color and make it a little bit darker and I'd like to saturate things a little bit more as you can see this is going to be a little bit more of a warm brown color and if your model is composed of multiple elements multiple meshes it's very easy to select some of those meshes for instance I'm going to grab the sort of um sort of like the inner connections of the character right there right click and oh my God Maya come on come on there we go assign existing material clay dark and as you can see we're going to get generate a little bit of a different view now you could of course just start adding like actual materials in this case right we could add some metals and some chromes and things like that I think that's something that I did with this character when when I was doing it for my class again this was like 10 years ago or something like that but in this particular case look at this we generate a little bit more of a variation for a character and we don't really need to do anything but tweak the colors of the object I do think this might be a little bit too dark to be honest so I'm going to bring it back a bit lighter and less saturated so the difference is not as much but I do want to see a little bit of uh of a difference on the materials that we have right there there we go and at this point it's just a matter of trying to decide which parts of the character we are going to add that new like color or that new effect to so I think for instance this guys this guys the ears again with right click I don't know what it is with Maya today Sun existing material clay dark there we go so now if we render all of those elements are going to have a slightly different Hue to the whole thing now finally this is a just a little bit of of an extra here I'm going to add some eye sockets to this thing I don't remember adding the eyes for this character as you can see they're just like Hollow elements and it does look a little bit weird so what we can do is we can add two very small spheres here on the center of the cavities they don't don't have to cover the whole cavity if you don't want in this case there we go going to right click and mirror this to the other side it's going to be x negative there we go I'm going to assign a new material Arnold AI standard surface and in this case for instance we can keep it as white and what we can do is maybe add some emission like make this eyes glow a little bit don't overdo the emission though like this is one of those things that you want to like keep it as as clean or as as simple as possible so that you don't get too much of of an effect like we don't want to distract too much some people might be like hey why not change the emission color to red right like's make this an an evil robot yeah that totally works as you can see right here or let's make this in a good robot you know blue and red are usually the colors that we associate with good and evil so I think red in this case looks very very nice and uh it fits with the character that we have right here so yeah that's pretty much it guys now once you have this there's a couple more things that you can do to make this pop even more this is like the final things and again sorry about the camera I'm going to fix that for for the next video but I wanted to record this for you guys so that uh we could like start over again and uh and make sure that we can produce as much content as you guys need so we're going to go here to the um what was I going to do oh yeah okay so the first thing I'm going to do is I do want to add a little bit of uh of a hue on the back part of the scene so I'm going to grab this uh rectangular light change its light shape to a dis make it a little bit smaller and this one's going to be pointing to the back but it's going to be really really low and what this will do is it's going to give me a little bit of a fade here on the background part and the back part you're going to see here uh it's not as obvious we might need to push that a little bit more let's try a 17 exposure and what I want to do is I want to generate a little bit of a glow on the background so yes there we go look at that yes we do want to separate the character from the background but we also don't want to have a a completely flat background because it just looks a little bit boring right and unless we're going to be modeling the whole scene which of course you can do just adding a little bit of of a separation there again another extra Spotlight will frame your character uh nicely as well it's going to give us this again sort of like an aura or like a halo for the whole thing so yeah that looks good I I really like how this is looking now is the point where we can add some postprocessing things so here on the imager we can add some lens effects and there's two things that you can add here first of all it's bloom bloom is really good because it's going to make your character kind of like glow a little bit don't overdo it people sometimes like just go overboard with the bloom this is just a very simple Bloom it's going to make you it's just going to make it a little bit nicer and if you want to add a little bit of beignet which again helps frame the character that's also another thing that you can do but again don't do it like too much right you you want to keep it as as clean and as nice as possible so something a little bit simple like like that is uh is good enough I even think that the bloom there is a little bit too much there we go now the higher the resolution the more feat you're going to be able to get and you can even take this into Photoshop add a sharpen pass add a little bit of color correction if you want like the sky is the limit where where when it comes to post- production in order to get rid of all of this things right here remember we need to up the samples so we need to go here and instead of eight I'm going to go all the way to 20 which is a lot of samples it's like really really like high on the intensity it's definitely going to take uh a couple of minutes to render this single shot but once it's done we're going to have a very very nice effect so that's it guys that's my little like shortcut or my little process to generating some very nice clean clay renders again make sure you have some good illumination make sure you play with different variations on colors for your clay and make sure you have a good composition with the camera if you do those three things I can guarantee your portfolio is going to look a lot a lot better of course if you want to continue like learning you need to go through the texturing stage to the animation stage like there's a lot more things that you can do but if you just want to showcase your models or your sculpts this is an excellent way to do it it looks very professional it looks very nice on your portfolio and you can get some nice exposure this way now um yeah that's pretty much it guys again sorry for the camera it's going to be fixed for the next one and I'm back I'm back I'm going to continue working here on the studio going to make sure to upload as much stuff as I can and if you want to support the channel if you want to support this project of course the best way to do it is by liking subscribing and checking our website for the full premium courses so that's it my friends I'll see you back on the next one

Channel: Abe Leal 3D

Views: 1,197

Keywords: abraham leal, abe leal, abe leal 3d, blender course, substance course, texturing course, maya course, marvelous course, AccuRig, character rigging, 3D animation, rigging tutorial, character testing, digital art, game development, visual effects, CGI characters, animation techniques, game design, VFX workflow, character design, animation software, 3D modeling, creative technology, animation process, video game art, filmmaking, digital characters

Id: C79j4a_GXNc

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024