Light Looks Weird

So I have a point light above a whitish plane which casts fine, but when I change the color of the plane to a blackish color the lighting looks really harsh. Why does this happen and how do I fix it?

light:

Light

dark:

dark

thanks!

Are you using hard or soft shadows? Because, hard shadows on bad quality looks some weird.

If I understand correctly, then I think the problem is simply that it’s a black material. If you think about it in code lighting looking something like this: ColorOfLight * ColorOfMaterial. If you’re like is {1,1,1} but you’re material is {0,0,0}, you’re always going to get {0,0,0} out.

If you use an alternate shader like Specular, however then you can change the reflection color for the specular part and get a “shiny black metal”. This is closer to what happens usually in the real world when you have a black material. There are anisotropic factors that make the material not perfectly black in every direction.