It is really important when you make materials for your object/scene that you have kind of neutral lighting situation in the scene, because lights tend to affect material in weird manners, which is uncontrolable when you are in stage of developing material idea into practice.. Building from previous reply, here's what you will do next (if you was I that is ): - you should put some long elongated planes outside of camera view and apply lambert material to them. - set lambert material color to white 100% and incandescence color to 100% white also... What you will get with this is so called reflection cards... they act as a form shaping light hints (speculars, but nevermind that) that will give mettalic quality to your object. Now, return to your blinn material of brass and turn on reflection..set it to low percentage (I don't have maya here, so out of my head start with default 0.5 and take it from there)... when you are satisfied with reflections...setup your lighting... What you should do is bring on the main light (key light).. where you put it depends on your camera angle torwards object and scene situation...but if we're looking 3/4 qtrs. down to the chalice...let's play with standard 3-point lighting... - place key light left of the camera and somewhat up torwards chalice (make the light spotlight)...play with radius and falloff...note that light should never be default settings... put something like 1.2 for intensity and make it slightly yellow (very slightly) - then you should put in the fill light..if you have floor on which chalice is planted on, put directional light (so we get a broad type of even light) down from the camera, right - put it below floor and orient it towards chalice...set it's intensity at around 0.6 and put it's hue toslightly blueish... now you will get some nice results...there is another key component tha's missing though.. - rim light...put another spotlight in the same height as key light but on the oposite side of the chalice (so that it is oriented towards camera)...make it's intensity really strong (like 2.0) and don't forget to turn it from white to slightly yellow now you should get a good start for light in your scene... this is the basic workflow of making up your scene... in the next reply I will discuss what improvements you may do, and what other steps you should do if this was a not-so simple object