Help? Shiny Blacks

[Jen]

So, on the mini on the left, I wanted to make the armor kind of shiney black. Not super patent leather shiny, but definitely not cloth. On the one on the right, it's supposed to be a black leather jacket.

Click to see full-sized image

Now, the jacket had a lot of folds and stuff sculpted in to it, so it wasn't real hard to pick out edges where sharp highlights should be and put them there. The armor...was all smooth, and didn't really have that. I had a really hard time figuring out how to put sharp highlights on there without making it look like weird stripes (and eventually gave up and just left it alone).

I'm not exactly thrilled with either of them, but I'm happier with the jacket than the armor. Help! What am I doing wrong? How can I get sharp, bright highlights on a smooth surface?