hi, i’m a very new user to blender. i was following polygon runway’s cyberpunk building tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMTwAQPbgKs), and for some reason, all my colors and lighting is super flat and even though i put metallic to 1, the materials are not reflecting and the lights are not having an emission effect. i would really appreciate some help as to what could be the issue.
thank you!
Welcome!
Your material reflects something. But this “something” is currently not properly illuminated.
Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.
But maybe this problem won’t be a problem anymore after changing some parts. Maybe add a bevel to the handrail of the balcony. It will reflect a little bit more light back onto the building.
For the emission shader problem. Try increasing the strength value. The light will probably start to appear.
What you mean with “flat” is probably the appearance of AgX. AgX is default since 4.0. The guy in the tutorial uses an older version with Filmic.
At around 26:52 he starts to explain about the Color Managment Tab. Just change the “View Transform” from “AgX” to “Filmic”. Maybe this will help.
I don’t know if it’s because it’s a screenshot, or you have some Z fighting (two faces close to each other) on the right side of the roof. Check for duplicates.
Nice start.
Look closely at the lighting settings at the end of the video.
The amount of light emitted should be adjusted appropriately without referring to the figures in the image.
The amount of emission of the Emission used in the window also seems to be large.
(The amount of light emitted depends on the size of the scene, so the same feeling does not come out unless it is a scene of the same size.)
If you want to apply the same settings as the video, you can make the scene size the same.
I think the floor size is 8m x 8m.
I assume you have no environment HDRI in your scene. Your materials reflect only light sources, right?
Use a HDRI in your world shader (get one at HDRI-Heaven) and you will seea dramatic change in your scene.
HDRI is not used in the video. 
In addition, using HDRI changes the atmosphere of Jang production shown in the video.
I don’t think HDRI is right for this scene. 
Didn’t have a look at the tutorial, just wanted to point out, that materials need something to reflect in order to look more natural and less “flat”.
As you can limit the influence of the HDRI to the reflections, it wouldn’t necessarily the “atmosphere”, depending on the HDRI you are using.
