Clay Studio Pro is a 3D Studio MAX Plugin that provides you with advanced metaball modeling and animation tools. Unlike normal modeling, where the user is forced to build objects polygonally, Clay Studio Pro allows you to create complex organic forms quickly and efficiently. Clay Studio Pro is very well suited for building organic forms such as human bodies, hands, animals, space creatures or other such difficult non-geometric forms.
Clay Studio Pro is made up of three tools. The first of these tools is the Clay Sphere. Clay Sphere modeling works by making use of spherical primitives as its basic building blocks. When the metaball surface is created, the Clay Spheres are assigned various strength values, which in turn determines their effect in the overall shape that is created.

Metaballs works in a similar fashion where each Clay Sphere primitive is similar to the drops of mercury and the Clay Surface is similar to the larger blob of combined mercury drops.

The second, and completely revolutionary primitive type that is present in Clay Studio Pro is the Clay Spline.The way the Clay Spline primitive works is by creating the metaball surface across the Knots (vertices) of a spline. Each knot (called a Clay Knot) can be assigned different strengths and orientations to fully control the resulting surface.

The Clay Surface is responsible for absorbing all of the clay primitives that reside in your scene as well as controlling most of the functionality, including grouping (for branched models such as hands). One of the other indispensable features that the Clay Surface affords the user is independent resolutions for the viewports and for rendering. That way, you can work in near real-time in the MAX viewports on lower resolution approximations of your surface, and still render at a high detail level for stunning output.

Unlike ordinary mapping Clay Studio Pro makes use of a mapping technique called Sticky Mapping. This will allow the maps to deform correctly to the objects surface and interations with other clay objects.