You basically have a very, very dark blue material with only the highlights using the texture, with a very small amount of environment map. The basic color comes from the Diffuse color plus the a tiny amount from the Environment map.
If you increase the percentage of the Environment map to 30-50% and maybe the specular map as well it will make a dark blue, shiny material. If you brighten the Diffuse color it could help but you should probably decrease the ambient factor to 0.3 and the diffuse factor to 0.7 or so if you do. Play around with these values and see what happens.
Hope this helps!
You know, I just got to thinking reading your post. Maybe the reason they "seem" dark is because there's nothing around them to contrast against. It's just a grid floor and a background. I do want to keep them a darker, richer color (though I guess since it's just for learning, it shouldn't matter what the color is), and when I increase the env map too much, it starts looking kinda cheesy. Tweaking the specular settings would probably yield good enough results.
Thanks!
