How to get that nice milky white render?

Sk8rSeth

so, im fairly new to the whole game, and ive got a decent set of rendering skills, but there is one render that i just cant figure out! its the amazing soft white eye candy style render.
how the heck!??

for reference, this is what im talking about:






can anyone tell me how to get that look? is it a specific material, or style? or is it rendered in a special way? inside marmoset, or mental ray??
how do I get my simple gray material to look so white and nice??

despite how it sounds, im not an idiot so please no 'set the material color to white' >_>

PhattyEwok

If you're using 3DS max give all the objects a lighter material then place a skylight into your scene and make sure light tracer is enabled in the render dialog. That should get you there.

Do some clean up and level adjustment in photoshop and you should be all set

DireWolf

Not only white, it needs to have zero spec, pure diffuse. The rest are about lighting.

- Want grey shaded, simple white dome light would do
- Want blue tone in your shadow, a sun & sky & GI would do the trick.

Alternatively you can also try those studio lighting or sky HDRI. Mamoset comes bundle with quite a few for you to pick from.

Bubblegut

it might be worth checking out andrew price's tutorials on youtube if you use blender. he has this method of using yellow light sources and white to give that nice glow in the last picture. he uses blender cycles for those types of renders. im not sure about 3dsmax and maya

fleity

wawawawwait what DireWolf and PhattyEwok said will surely get you to a result similar to picture 2 und 3 but picture 1 is a completeley different thing. while the later too actually use some form of global illumination the first one only fakes it.
image 1 is an ambient occlusion render (just google for it there are thousands of tutorials / answers)