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I wanted to share some of my techniques how to render nice clay and wire pics for your WIPs in 3D Studio Max 9.

CLAY AND WIRE FOR MAX9


1.1 Setting up the Renderer

open your model and assign a standard mat to your objects
hit F10 go to the "common" tab
set render to mental ray


go to indirect illumination tab
and enable Final Gather
From the preset drop down choose low or draft (for speed reasons, you can set it to better settings if needed)





1.2 lighting

add a skylight to the scene
set the lightcolor to a light blue


testrender:

looks too flat and too dark, we even get some bad FG artifacts.

add an area omni to your scene (i usually sit it up in a 90 degree angle to the camera)
activate raytraced shadows
set color to bright yellow
set shadow color to a dark blue (e.g.: 0,0,4)
activate area light parameters
adjust the radius(depends on your scene)
adjust the u and v samples, the higher the softer the and better the shadows will look (5 might not be enough try 8 or 10 but don´t go overboard coz that´ll kill your rendertimes)


testrender:

looks better still some things to improve, notice that the render has a lot more depth to it




1.3. material

hit m
select new unassigned mat
hit the button reading standardd
select "arch & design (mi)" shader


tweaking the shader:
adjust the color to a light grey (you can also give it some kind of tint)
increase the refectivity a little
reduce the glossiness (to your taste)
special effects section
activate ambient occlusion
increase the samples
increase the distance (basically the higher the distance is set the more darker areas you get)


testrender:

the included ambient occlusion make your details pop which easily can get lost in some poorly lit FG render without being to heavy on the rendertimes



1.4. the ground

copy the shader we just set up
rename it
assign it to your groundplane

choose a darker color
reduce the reflection glossiness
we keep the other settings
go to special purpose maps section
assign a cutout map by clicking the empty slot
choose a gradient ramp map

set the gradient type to radial
and adjust the gradient until you have something simillar to the one i´ve set up


the final clay pic

looks pretty cool now with a lot of depth



1.5. wires

select a new material slot
hit the "standard" button
select a composite material


drag the clay material into the base material slot of the composite material (instance)
as material 1 add a standard material


settings for the material in the 1st slot of the composite material:
activate wires
set the color to black or whatever suits you ( you also can make your wires self illuminated if you want to)


assign it to your objects and hit render

the thikness of the actual wire lines can be adjusted accessing the extended parameters of the black standard material (material 1 of the composite material)

the final wire:

obviously it´s a bad choice to make the wires and the background all black

that´s it, hope it´s of some use to some of you.
C&C welcome.