Handmade Clay Texture

[Mark Walczak]

Here’s my two cents:

If you ready any behind-the-scenes info on this project, you’ll see that HOURS and HOURS were spent rendering each frame, so unless you have access to a sizable farm, I wouldn’t expect to try to match this exactly. Furthermore, photographic materials such as these require great renderers (like AR3), although I think they used Maxwell on these jobs.

Anyhoo, to answer your question, I would be sure to start with a Blinn or Oren-Mayer shading model first. The clay is definitely not a Phong. For effects like this, I have found that blurring the reflections helps tremendously. Finally, top it all of with a nice displacement map, and you should be on your way to getting started. Renders of this quality also depend greatly on your lighting expertise (which is going to really help you here). Finally (really this time), it is key to nail this effect in post. Don’t try to do it all in the renderer, as it will truly slow down your pipeline (at least in my experience).

Hope this helps!

https://vimeo.com/explosivegraffix

[Chris Thomas]

Hi Mark,

Thanks so much for your two cents. I’m less worried about render time, as I’m only looking to export one frame (it’s for a poster). I’m going to give your suggestions a shot and see what we come up with. If I get it, I’ll post for everyone to see, as well as some detailed instructions. I’m using Maxwell to light the scene, so it’s a possibility that I’ll get somewhere close..

Thanks again!

Best,
Chris

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Just guessing here, but I would bet that there’s some kind of subsurface scattering component to the shader.