I found this siege guardian shield in the game files that looked like it would be a great character item, but it was all stretched out funny and too big, so i popped it in blender and changed the size and reshaped it to make it look better for a player (smaller arm guard and stuff) also I tried to make the middle look like the texture files imply its supposed to look.... round lol. I almost wonder if it was meant to be for the player but was scrapped, as it seems to fit the descriptions of the Parma's Steam-Shield/Mechanoid/Coal Burner much better than that weird skull thingy. Anyways here's a zip if anyone wants it.

It's a lighting issue.

Quick rundown of 3D lighting:
Surfaces in ORGE (and most other 3D engines) have two fundamental features, shape and color. Shape is controlled by the mesh file. We don't care about shape for purposes of answering your question, so I'm not going to say any more about it. Color is controlled by the material file. Inside the material file, you've got four things that impact the color: the diffuse, ambient. specular, and emissive values. You can either specify these as numerical RGB triads that affect the whole surface or as images, in which case a separate RGB triad is computed for each point on the surface based on its location in the image. Diffuse is the base color of the surface regardless of light (or under pure white light, which amounts to the same thing). Usually an image is used for diffuse. Ambient is how much and what shade of undirectional background light the surface reflects. Specular is how much direct and what shade of direct light the surface reflects. Finally, emissive is how much and what shade of light the surface emits on its own. To compute the final color for any given point, multiply ambient by the ambient light in the scene, multiply specular by the directional light hitting the surface, and add everything together.

So, what goes wrong to create a "saran wrap" look? After adding everything together, you're ending up with values close to {1.0, 1.0, 1.0} for many of the pixels. This probably means that the ambient, or specular, or both are too high given the light sources in the scene. ("Shiny" probably means too much specular; "just white" probably means too much ambient.) BUT WAIT! Before you go edit the material file, make sure that the lighting in editor's scene is a fair semblance of the lighting in game. If the lighting is dimmer in game than in the editor, objects that look "saran wrapped" in the editor may well look just fine in game.

thanks you so much Chthon! Learning so much from you guys 

In this case though I think it just due to the "rimlight" setting. Turning that off makes it go away and decreasing the ambient/specular didn't fix it - I think TL2 is just very agressive and actually DOES saran wrap everything with this 'rimlight' of theirs. I don't know how to turn it off in game, unfortunately. I checked in globals.dat and I could find anything, and so I can only turn it off in the editor testing mode rn. :/

okay so I tested it (ableit in the GUTS, not actually by booting up the game) by turning the rimlight setting on/off (this requires restarting GUTS though for the changed to take effect fyi) and its definitely the rimlight. Its horrible looking imo, but I guess all of our armors and weapons will never go bad they're so tightly sara-wrapped up   Here's a comparison with JUST the rimlight toggled on/off in the guts tester. Is there a way to specifically just tone it down, or mod-wise deactivate it (rather than just having users turn it off in game settings themselves?)

no its still all 0 :/ turning the rimlight off or using gimp to darken the rimmlight dds get rid of the issue, so it might not be a lighting issue, but purely a rimlighting one. Do emissive/specular/ambient interact with rimlight?