Why is my entire render white? I attempted to render my first short movie in Blender (2.68) today, just a 3D structure of a molecule rotating. I imported it using Atomic Blender converted it to a solid object and then rotated the camera around it. When I play the animation in 3D view, it looks fine, but when I render it as an .avi movie, all I see is the background, the molecule is invisible.  It seems that the molecule is just white on white, so I need to add textures to the molecule.

Is there a way to make it look like it does in 3D view without having to add the textures to every atom manually?

I uploaded the file here: http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=21234281675843448966
Based on the file that you uploaded and your question (which I have now edited accordingly), you are actually asking about material settings.

The model does have materials. The problem was that the World color, specifically the Ambient color was set to full white and was overriding everything and making the entire scene look as such.

Here is your render with your current settings.



Here is the same render with the Ambient color set to full white and the others changed to show the contrast.



Here is your render with only the world settings changed (to the default settings) and a hemi lamp instead of the point lamp that you had to make it a bit brighter.