I’m recreating some scenes from the good old game, The Neverhood. Modeling the stuff is quite fun, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t get the clay textures to look even remotely believable.
Any suggestions on how to go about this?
Use…
-Oren-Nayer diffuse shading with slight roughness
-Low specularity
-Some light SSS and translucency
-Some ramp shading to tweak the way lighting falls off the material
That got me quite far. Thank you. It now looks a bit like clay. I’ll keep pounding it until it looks like the screenshots. 
Clay can have wide range of textures. It can be every thing from wet and glossy to all the way down to rough and dull. I experimented with spun clay while it is still wet. It has specular and soft streaks. Which, I recreated with normal map.
Its clear, part of clay object is about texture but also it has some thing to do with its organic form about them.
The clay in the Neverhood game which he was trying to recreate was mostly smooth and dull, a little more like play-doh than wet clay (google for screenshots from the game to have an idea)