   Simple lighting woes
  Hello - I'm struggling with lighting in general (I'm new to 3d programming) - I appreciate anyone's help.  In general, it seems that all my rendered, non-textured object are really dark.  Currently I only have one directional light in the scene pointing down the negative-z axis.  It seems like no matter what combinations I try, whether doing color tracking, or specifying materials for each object, it always comes out too dark.  If I turn up a material's ambient light too high, then the object looks flat and doesn't shade properly when it rotates - and it still doesn't make it bright enough.  My normals are calculated properly though, as when I turn ambient lighting down and diffuse up, objects shade properly as they rotate.I guess my question is, if I have a scene with objects being loaded in from vertex arrays, is it possible to use color tracking and have a bright scene and proper shading?  What would make sense for light type (locational/directional), position, and ambient/diffuse settings, and what would make sense to track for color (ambient/diffused/both)?  I've read through a lot of tutorials but I just can't seem to make it happen for some reason.  It's always just very dark.Thanks so much   
  Are you scaling the object by any chance? That will scale normals too and consequently affect the lighting. If so, use glEnable(GL_NORMALIZE) so that your normals are always unit-length.   ;  No scaling, just rotation and translation.  Out of curiousity, if I set a light source's ambient and diffuse light both to white (1,1,1), I turn color material tracking on, and then I create a red cube and calculate normals and whatnot, should it be shading correctly as it rotates, or should it be flat since it's reflecting ambient and diffuse at the same intensity?   I just want to make sure as I debug this that I'm expecting the right thing.;  I vaguely remember having this same problem a long time ago, but I don't recall how I fixed it.Are you also specifying the ambient color for your light (not just your material)?  Make sure the ambient color for your light is (1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f).  If your material ambient colors are all (1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f) and so are all your light colors, everything should be completely bright.  If you try this and everything is still dark, you may be setting up OpenGL incorrectly, or you may have some gamma setting for your video card set to a strange value.Also remember that if you are using colored lighting, materials, or textures, that materials need to have similar colors to the light in order to pick up the light.  For debugging purposes, use an all-white texture, all-white materials, and all-white lights.  Good luck.;  Just post the code, it should be short enough. You realize that all we can do with the info you gave is just guessing.;  It's okay - I think the question I really have is just my one about ambient/diffuse in general - if you set a light source to white (1,1,1) for both ambient and diffuse, and then set the material of an object to equally reflect both ambient and diffuse (regardless of the color, we'll just say red, 1,0,0), assuming normals are calculated correctly, when the object rotates should it show the proper shading or will the object look flat since it's reflecting the same amount of ambient as it is diffuse lighting?Also, I just found out why everything was very dim, I had glEnabled 2D Textures, and objects that had textures attached looked correct, but objects without 2D textures were REALLY dim.  If I make sure it isn't processing 2D textures on objects without textures they look super bright again.