How high intensity are your lights set to? I did a quick search and found this: Blown out highlights on Paint Effects in moderately bright lighting Q: My real problem comes in when I raise the value of one directional light to a measly "2"...the paint effects are completely blown out and there does not seem to be a global light sensitivity for the paint effects...are they simply hard coded to work in the 0-1 range? A: When brushes aren't textured the specular seems to increase as the square of the brightness( a bug ). The command scaleBrushBrightness( Maya3.0 or later ) adjusts the brightness of either all picked brushes or the current default brush. It also accounts for the specular problem. It turns out that quite a few parameters must be adjusted currently ( an added brightness parameter on brushes would be a good idea! ). Here are some examples of the usage of this command. scaleBrushBrightness 0.5 0 This will dim your brushes by 50%. To modify the current default or template brush type: scaleBrushBrightness 0.5 1 ( the second parameter is a toggle to affect the default brush) To restore the brush to what it was before the last scale, scale by the inverse (i.e. 1/scale ) that you used, in this case: scaleBrushBrightness 2.0 1