Creating a brushed metal finish in Blender

Blender’s shader nodes offer powerful tools for creating highly realistic materials. One common yet visually striking material is brushed aluminum, which is widely used in industrial design, electronics, and home appliances. This guide will walk you through the steps to create a convincing brushed aluminum texture using Blender’s shader node editor.

Step 1: Set Up the Material

To begin, you’ll need to create a new material for the object you’re texturing:

1. Select your object in the 3D viewport.
2. Open the Shader Editor.
3. Click New to create a new material.
4. Rename the material to something like “Brushed Aluminum” for clarity.

Blender’s default material is the Principled BSDF, which is ideal for most physically-based materials, including metals. Keep this node as the base for your material.

Step 2: Adjust Metallic and Roughness Values

Since aluminum is a metal, you need to adjust a few key settings in the Principled BSDF node:

• Set the Metallic value to 1. This ensures the shader behaves like a metal, giving it that signature reflective property.
• Adjust the Roughness value to control how polished or rough the aluminum appears. For brushed aluminum, a good starting point is a roughness between 0.3 and 0.6. The exact value will depend on how coarse you want the brushed effect to be.

Step 3: Creating the Brushed Effect

The brushed look of aluminum comes from the fine, directional scratches that are engraved into the surface. To replicate this in Blender, you’ll need to introduce anisotropy into the shader.

1. Add an Anisotropic BSDF Node: In the shader editor, press Shift + A, go to Shader, and select Anisotropic BSDF.

• Connect this node to a Mix Shader node to combine it with the Principled BSDF.

1. Control the Anisotropy: In the Anisotropic BSDF node, increase the Anisotropy value to give the material that directional reflection typical of brushed metal. A good starting point is around 0.8.

• Set the Rotation value to control the direction of the brushed lines. If the object is cylindrical, for instance, you can rotate the lines to follow the object’s geometry.

Step 4: Add Procedural Texture for Brushed Detail

To enhance the realism, we’ll introduce a procedural texture that mimics the subtle scratches of brushed aluminum.

1. Add a Noise Texture: Press Shift + A, go to Texture, and select Noise Texture.
2. Scale the Noise Texture: In the Noise Texture node, set the Scale to a high value, around 200 to 400, to create fine, tightly-packed lines.
3. Use a Mapping Node: To ensure the noise follows a linear direction (simulating the brushed pattern), add a Mapping node. Connect the Noise Texture through the mapping node, and adjust the scale in one axis to stretch the texture lines along the desired direction.
4. Combine with Bump Map: For added depth, use this texture as a bump map:

• Add a Bump Node and connect the Noise Texture’s output to the Height input of the Bump node.
• Connect the Bump node to the Normal input of the Anisotropic BSDF.
• Adjust the Strength of the bump map to control the intensity of the brushed detail.

Step 5: Finishing Touches

Once the brushed pattern is in place, tweak a few settings to refine the material:

• Fine-tune the Roughness and Anisotropy values to achieve the desired balance between the polished and brushed appearance.
• If the reflections look too uniform, you can introduce slight imperfections by using a Noise Texture connected to the roughness input of the Principled BSDF.