Hi,
I’m wondering why I can’t get Blender to render the colour white. Right now, I’m making alittle project, a USB storage device. The plastic around the metal case should be white, but it won’t render it white! The material is set to white, and the UV I’ve made is white, but Blender still renders the white, grey. I’ve tried anything! Please help me out of this one… 
That is normal isn’t it? 3d programs shade things to represent realistic light and that is probably the result.
Although it looks like the metal and the case are the exact same material, make sure they are not.
How can I make a difference if I can’t make the plastic white as in white… Seriously I don’t understand why Blender can’t render the colour white.
You need to mesh with the Shader settings in the white material. I believe you need to turn diffuse (not sure if that’s what it’s called, it’s right next to specularity…) way up. If that doesn’t work, try increasing the light’s intensity value.
Post a screenshot of the material settings if that doesn’t work and I will tell you how to get it to be white.
The diffuse Colour is set to as white as possible. If I making the light stronger it will look wierd… 
Well, this is not as easy as you think. Blender does it perfectly right, it all depends on your whole scene, as the lighting setup. You might not need to make lights stronger, but change their position, add others and so on. A standard three point rig should work great for an object presentation like this one. You might also enable AO to add more light to your scene.
Then there are material settings. First off, you should play with Diffuse settings. You have not set them to the maximum, which is what you could try next. You could use another diffuse shader (Minnaert gives a lot of control for this kind of materials, in my opinion) and there’s always the emit slider, which is always good to add subtle effects.
Keep in mind, even if Blender’s internal engine is optimized for speed rather than for realism, you still need to think about how it interprets the physical properties of light. So, just setting the color to white won’t be enough…
Three point rig? AO?
I have set Diffuse to absolutely max… And I have tried all the shaders…
Hi,
It looks grey because it is is not reflecting enough light to make it look white. You can either increase the amount of light (strengthen your lights, add more lights or bring them closer) or increase the amount of reflection in your material settings (Ref is 0.8 by default).
You could try turning up the emit on the material.
Just don’t worry about it - it’s white. That’s how white looks under some circumstances. If all the sides looked pure 100% monitor white - how would you show highlights on it? They can’t be 150% white.
There’s really no such thing as a pure colour in the real world. Everything has shadow colours, highlight colours, diffuse colour, reflected colour, specular colour, relfected light colour - it’s a whole mish-mash of effects that just look right when rendered in a complementary scene.
What you need to do is to get rid of the hideous default Blender blue. Make it a dark bluey grey or something.
But rest assured that regardless of what you think you see, Blender isn’t failing you. You just need to learn a lot more about lighting and scene building. (EDIT) Adjust your lamps - they probably need to be brighter. Things reflect light and the light reflected determines the colour we perceive. A white stick in a room without lights isn’t white, it’s black. A white stick illuminated only by yellow light becomes a yellow stick. To appear “true” white it needs to be illuminated by bright white lights. How bright depends on the scene, the distance from lamp to object and the fall-off value (distance setting) of the lamp - among other things. So, increase your lamp values by 20% and render again. Just keep trying until it makes sense.(/EDIT)
Find a photo of the real thing and look at it in Gimp or Photoshop and do some colour sampling - it won’t be white unless it 's a really crappy pic with no highlight or shadow.
I agree with AndyD. I bet if you made the world colors white it would look less gray. Also, you could increase AO strength (to 2.0) or increase your lamp strengths.
If you don’t want to render against a white background then you might want to render RGB and A so that you can remove the white background later and put in something else.
Here’s some examples.
The white ball in each pic is exactly the same ball. The RGB sliders are all set to 1.00, spec is set to 0.3 and hard to 300. The scenes are lit with three lights (plus a buffer shadow lamp but this isn’t used if you’re ray tracing). I’ve used a white sun, energy 0.9, a purple-blue hemi, energy 0.5 and a blue-grey “bounce” lamp below, energy 0.3. The hemi and bounce lamp have “spec” turned off to remove their highlight from the object.
The white ball looks grey if you study it but looks acceptably white in some scenes moreso than others. This is hardly an exhaustive test and there are numerous answers to your basic question but they will usually relate to lighting and scene, rather than material.
Yeah, there’s all that, but I recommend just turning up “emit”.
A three-point lighting setup wouldn’t hurt though.
yeh your lighting isnt enough to brighten the white to LOOK white
after you put all your materials together though it should look better
good model by the way
So, you heard a lot about lighting (including from myself) and so you might need a place where to start…
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Lighting
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Lighting_Rigs
And AO is Ambient Occlusion. Another quick look at the manual should provide you all the nessecary informations on how to use it 
You can make the object shadeless!
