I finally put together some renders last night. And the sad thing is they now look horribly “flat”. I figured it would be more realistic to use a single light representing the sun, and that this would be a Distant light type. The effect it seems to have is that all of the specular highlights basically go away. Is this to be expected with a distant light because the light rays are all parallel?

Shadows are set to ray trace, light intensity set to 0.18, with everything else the defaults. Rendered with Micropoly renderer. Gamma set to 2.2 in mplay, with all textures stripped of gamma in their shaders per circusmonkey's suggestions.

It looks like this:



Is there a better way to light this? The scene will ultimately take place in low orbit around a planet (Mars), if that matters at all.