Thank you!!Originally posted by dilberts
As long as you have Maya Unlimited with Mental Ray it's easy. Just go to Render Globals, turn off enable default lights, go to Final Gather in the Mental Ray options and turn it on. Put a sphere or background around your model and perhaps another surface that has a really bright white incandescence (this acts as the light) in a nice reflective position, and voila you have a clay render (make sure your model has a lambert shader assigned to it).
There's lots of tutorials out there for this technique.