I made a knife skin, compiled it, put the skins in the materials folder and wanted to test it.
However, once ingame i noticed that outside of buildings the knife is not much short of white, and inside it is not much short of white but you can at least see some shade.
I have. Its correct. I checked it with a different knife and its normal. The skins color of the second knife is the same color brightness as the one that has the problems
BY the looks, it's something to do with specular (ref map stuff). Open the model in the SDK's model viewer with specular on and specular off, if the "effect" goes when specular is off, then show us the .vmt and I can sort the problem for you.