Hi there, I've looked through the reference book, but I still seem to be doing something wrong. :/ I'm trying to change the colour of the P5 man winter jacket. When I change it (or think I change it), it appears to change colour in the camera window. But when I render it, it's still black. Can someone please give me a step by step guide of how to change its colour to, say pink (my P5 man is a SNAG). I think I'm manipulating the wrong colours. Thank you. Michelle

Could you post a screen shot of your material and render settings?

Sure. How do I get a screen capture?

I use !Quick Screen Capture from http://www.etrusoft.com

Weird... it rendered pink that time. But won't for the pyjama bottoms...

Is it on purpose that you set the Ambient to that pink too? it'll make it olook like it's glowing. For clothes, Ambient should be black.

Just adding that you don't need a program to take a screenshot. Just press "print screen" key on the keyboard, open your graphic program and paste the clipboard contents. The screenshot is now there. Crop, resize and save as a .jpg or .gif.

I would add to what ernyoka said and say that unless you are going to a plastic look, you should also set specular color and translucence color to pure black. If you want to change the color of something use diffuse color. All specular does is make objects more or less shiney and you should use shades of grey for that. Translucence just lets light pass through, sort of like polythene does. It too should be a shade of grey. And ambient gives a glowing effect, it you want clothes to glow in the dark use it, otherwise don't.

Cool. Thanks for the advice guys. It's my first time playing with these settings, so your help is very much appreciated. :)

Lots of things have a material called Preview. I don't understand what Preview is, except that it seems to show up in the document window but not in renders. Be sure that you're not setting the Preview color, because setting it is pointless and confusing (as far as I know). Also, you have a texture map attacked to the jacket. Do you want it? The pink is going to interact with the texture map. If you just want pink only, disconnect the texture. If, however, you want to use a texture map, then you want Diffuse set to white so the map renders as-is. Otherwise, the diffuse color alters the texture map (which, in some cases, you may want to do to alter the tone of the texture map).