How to make a surface really white?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi guys,

I am starting with blender and I have been doing some tutorials. I have tried to set the plane surface to white color, but altough I set all the RGB of the material 1.0, it is still giving me a grey color. am I missing something? is tere any other material super-imposed by default and is hidden.

Thanks for your answers.

2

the grey is probably coming from the shading from your light sources. To make something completely white, RGB to 1.0 and click the shadeless button in the materials window.

3

Hi icosium,

I sometimes adjust the Emit slider higher, to get a real white effect.

4

Just remember that if you set the object to have an emit of 1.0 that means that it really can’t get any shadows because it will be fully illuminated all the time, regardless of lighting conditions. Probably the best thing to do is to increase the brightness of the lamp until you get the desired results.

5

you can also turn up the exposure setting in the world buttons.

6

Try these settings.

R 1.0
G 1.0
B 1.0

Ref 1.0

7

In full light, you can only achieve true white color with a ref value of one. Lower values gives darker results. JDA is perfectly right about the pure white settings.

Boosting the Emit value will “false” your render, as if you totally turn off all your lights, the object with a Emit value will still be visible (proportionally to the Emit value, of course) so I feel this should not be the way to make real white colors, as your render would not behave reallistically (but it could be your purpose, anyway).

Finally, you can also turn on the Shadeless button in the material context buttons if you want to achieve a pure plain color, as defined by the RGB and Ref values, along with the lamp Energy inetnsity, without shading or self-shading of the faces.

Hope this helps,

8

Wanna make something look ‘white?’ Put something that the eye accepts as ‘dark’ right beside it!

Your eye doesn’t look so much at “absolute light-values” as it looks at contrast. In a gloomy, dark night, the gleam of the sword-blade of that slathering grue over there… looks white. But it can’t be white because there is no source of white-light around. (Except maybe in your face as you realize that the slathering-grue plans to have you over for dinner.)