Clay renders strip everything to light, form, and shadow, giving you a quick way to evaluate massing, daylight, and camera angles before spending time on texturing your designs.
Unlike other rendering styles that rely on high-resolution textures, glossy materials, and long render times, a clay render uses a single mid-grey material and simple, even lighting, so you can generate it in minutes (or even seconds), with almost no settings-tweaking.
Regardless of the rendering software you're using, here's the overview of the process to create a clean clay rendering:
Clean the model:
Make every surface face out.
Merge any stray points closer than 0.5 mm, and delete double faces.
Double-check the scale. If the door is 2m tall in CAD, it should stay 2m tall.
Paint everything one grey color:
Use the “override” switch to apply a single mid-grey paint. Exclude the glass layers, though, so windows stay see-through.
Add plain, even lighting:
Exterior study: use the default Sun-Sky set to about 55° high or load a cloudy-sky HDRI image.
Interior study: keep that HDRI, plus drop a 50% grey floor plane to bounce a bit of light back up.
Run a quick, denoised render:
Keep the samples at 64–128spp (in Cycles) or 0.01 noise threshold (in V‑Ray).
Enable native AI denoiser (if available in your renderer).
Export a layered EXR file:
Tick the extra passes: main image, Ambient Occlusion (AO), Normals, and Depth.
EXR has a huge brightness range, so those extra layers will be easy to work with in Photoshop or After Effects.
The above preparation steps won't take you more than a few minutes using traditional rendering software.
Let's now go through the steps you need to take to visualize your design in clay style, depending on the renderer you're using.
How to create a clay render in different tools
Clay rendering in MyArchitectAI
By far the easiest and quickest method, MyArchitectAI lets you achieve conceptual rendering styles such as clay model, watercolor, Bauhaus, and more in about 10 seconds per scene.
Here's how.
1/ Upload the image of your design.
2/ Select the "style transfer" engine.
3/ Choose the style.
4/ Click the "generate" button.
That's it. Your render will be ready to download in 4K in a matter of seconds.
MyArchitectAI lets you visualize 10 designs for free, and you don't even need to install anything - just sign up on the website.
Clay rendering in Twinmotion
Clay rendering in 3ds Max
Clay rendering in V-Ray
Clay rendering in Maya
Clay rendering in Enscape
Clay rendering in D5 Render
Clay rendering in Lumion
Clay rendering in Blender
Clay rendering settings cheat sheet
No matter what rendering program you're using, here are the settings you can use as a starting point:
Neutral grey: 0.65 linear (≈0.8 sRGB, #CCCCCC). It’s bright enough to see the shapes, and dark enough to show shadows.
Gamma: stay linear (1.0), then apply the usual monitor curve (gamma 2.2) for accurate lighting and nice screen contrast.
Interior exposure: EV 10 (ISO 100 → 1/60 s at f‑8) for a well-lit room feel.
Exterior exposure: EV 14 (ISO 100 → 1/500 s at f‑8) for a noon outdoors feel without blown whites.
Render samples: combine 64 spp (light rays per pixel) with an AI denoiser for a quick and clean preview.
Start with these settings as defaults, and tweak from there to fine-tune accuracy.
And remember to choose GPU over CPU rendering for best performance.
Troubleshooting clay renders
Here are some of the most common problems you can face when creating clay renders and how to quickly fix them:
Random dark blobs on the surfaces. Switch render to linear, then add the monitor curve (gamma 2.2) in Photoshop or your viewer.
Windows turn solid grey. Happens when the material override hits transparency. Solve by putting all the glass on its own layer and having the override button ignore that layer.
Scene looks lifeless, with flat shadows. Happens when your sky picture (HDRI) is too dim. Solve by doubling HDRI intensity until the histogram mid‑point.
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