Re: Animation Question
 

Quick metal material:

Change from stand to a Raytraced material, t provides more options for shinyness. A really nice reflection for glass is a shiness of 160 and a gloss of 63. Raytraced materials allow for immediate transparency setting and reflection settings. Metals typically reflect 30-50, but just mess with it.

In the maps rollout of the material editor is where you neeed to focus next. Diffusing to anything is simply not enough. What you want to do is diffuse to a good metal plate texture or something. A good site for free thumbnail textures is http://www.arroway.de

Next you NEED, and i reiterate... NEED!! To us bump mapping (also in the maps rollout). It is a quick and easy way to give a solid shape simluted texture without actually manually building the texture.

And of course, on top of everything you need to use proper lighting, I like using omni-lights myself for most things. But most people know how to mess with that. Ratraced shadow efects are a nice addition without to metal ray shaders and adv lighting effects.

I hope sumtin there helps :)