04-07-2012, 03:09 AM
With your spheres: too much reflect light! Remember, you're trying to represent light bouncing off of an object and hitting the eye of the viewer. So your shadows should have a very compressed value range, since they're just representative of shadows. Also, because of the way that light hits an object, you'll find that texture is much more apparent outside of direct light or complete shadow - the reason being that there are more tiny ridges and nooks and visible crannies for light to brush against at the terminator edge (edge of the shadow)