White material shows up as gray regardless of lighting i have just finished Blender Guru's rigid body simulation video and was looking to texture and render it, but i have encountered an issue with adding a white material and having it show up as an adequate shade.

So far i have tried:
Changing the brightness of the light
Changing the emission of the material
Changing the render engine (To Cycles)
Changing the color of the blender background
Exporting the rigid body sim to keyframes and changing the material

Some of these work, but do not give me the result i am looking for. The two files attached below show what i am up to (rigid body sim) and what i am aiming for (default). Essentially i can make a new blender file and add a plain with the default material and have it work, but when adding the default material in the rigid body sim, it looks very dissimilar.  

I feel like  this post is vaguely relevant, but (i thought) material override is removed in blender 2.8.  

Files:
Simple blender file with the color that i am looking for:  Default.blend 
The file that i am trying to fix:  Rigid body sim.blend   

Thanks!
I looked at both files and the only difference really is that you got rid of the camera and light in the wrecking ball file.

If that is the only thing you want to change:


Load the "rigid body sim.blend" file.
Switch the render engine to cycles to get the same result and switch to render view!
Go in the file menu and select "Append..."
Find and double click the "default.blend" file to open up it's content to chose from.
Go in the "Objects" folder and select "Camera" and "Light"
Confirm to load.
In the scene the two new objects are hidden inside the cubes, so select them and scale them (yes scale, will only scale them in regard of position from world center) far enough to have a good view. Check by switching to the camera view.
Now select the light and increase it's Power from 1000 to something like 10000+..
Go from there and you should be fine.


Here the visual aid/explanation: