One thing you can do to make your objects look more like metal is to give them a specular setting close to the main color of the object, but higher in intensity. One mistake is to often make the specular a pure white. This makes objects look more like plastic than metal. For example, if you are trying to make gold, don't make the specular pure white, but try a bright yellow or yellow/orange creame color.
Another problem is that many metals reflect the world. For example a chrome ball is pretty much just a shiny mirror. Thus, if you want to make realistic metals you will need to at least simulate reflection. This can be done by adding a global reflect map, doing a true ray trace or even just setting sky colors in the stage editor.
You can use the following Attribute setting for a default gold:
RED GREEN BLUE VALUE
COLOR 205 205 80 *
REFLECT 180 160 125 *
FILTER 0 0 0 *
SPECULAR 255 255 160 *
DITHERING * * * 255
HARDNESS * * * 255
ROUGHNESS * * * 0
SHININESS * * * 0
PHONG = ON
INDEX = 1.00
FOG LENGTH = 0.00
This should give you something close to gold. Note that the reflect values are fairly high. You may wish to lower them to see how it would look if you don't have anything to reflect etc...
Last Update: July 13, 1995