SF METAL

Nine procedural metal materials for Blender, built from one node

group: brushed aluminum, brushed steel, gunmetal, polished chrome,

gold, copper, scratched steel, rusty steel and shipwreck. Every

control is a named slider. No image textures, no UVs, nothing to bake.

THE BRUSHED GRAIN ACTUALLY RENDERS IN EEVEE

Blender's Anisotropic and Anisotropic Rotation sockets are Cycles-only.

EEVEE accepts them, renders, and silently produces generic soft metal

with no directional highlight — no error, no warning, just a worse

image. That is why so much brushed metal disappoints in EEVEE.

SF Metal exposes no anisotropy socket anywhere. The grain is a noise

field stretched roughly 65:1 along the brush axis, driving roughness

up and down around the base value, with a fine streak bump on top.

EEVEE renders all of that normally, so the elongated highlight

smearing along the grain is there in the viewport and in the render.

The honest trade: because the grain is roughness-driven, Cycles will

not give you true anisotropic highlights from this pack either. You

are buying a grain that renders in both engines instead of one that

renders in one.

WHAT'S IN THE PACK

  SF_Metal_BrushedAluminum   directional grain, warm grey

  SF_Metal_BrushedSteel      cooler, tighter grain

  SF_Metal_Gunmetal          dark, low-key

  SF_Metal_PolishedChrome    near-mirror

  SF_Metal_Gold              warm, soft falloff

  SF_Metal_Copper            deep orange-red

  SF_Metal_ScratchedSteel    clustered wear lines

  SF_Metal_RustySteel        ragged oxide patches

  SF_Metal_Shipwreck         rust taken all the way

Plus a showcase scene: all nine on their own beveled blocks, lit by

Blender's own default light on a neutral floor with a 50mm camera.

Nothing borrowed, nothing to set up. Beveled blocks rather than

spheres because a chamfered edge catches the reflection along the

arris, which is where brushed grain, scratches and edge rust show.

THE SLIDERS

  Brushed Amount / Streak Scale / Streak Contrast / Streak Bump

  Scratch Amount / Scratch Scale

  Rust Amount / Rust Scale / Rust Color / Rust Color 2

  Coat Weight / Coat Roughness / Rough Variation

Rust is a material switch, not a brown tint: where it takes hold the

surface goes dielectric, matte and crusted. That switch is what reads

as corrosion — a brown tint on a still-metallic surface reads as

painted metal instead.

RENDER COST, MEASURED AND PUBLISHED

EEVEE at 1920x1080, 64 TAA samples, median of three runs, against a

plain Principled material on the same shot:

  nine objects in frame          +40.4%

  one object filling the frame   +84.6%

Those two numbers are not comparable to each other. The second is the

worst case — a screen entirely covered in the material — and it is

published so you know the ceiling. The node group is 42 nodes against

a 60-node budget we hold ourselves to, because EEVEE pays a per-node

cost even on branches whose sliders are at zero.

Nobody else publishes these numbers. That is the point.

HONEST LIMITS

- Metal is nearly pure reflection. In a scene with an empty world and

  no nearby geometry it reads as a flat grey box, because there is

  genuinely nothing for it to show you. Give it an HDRI, a bright

  plane out of frame, or any other geometry. Chrome and gold are the

  most sensitive; the rusted and brushed variants are forgiving.

- No true anisotropic highlights in Cycles — see the trade above.

- Reset to Default Value does not restore the variant. All nine share

  one node group, so reset gold and you get generic metal. The Asset

  Browser is the real undo: drag a fresh copy in.

- Blender 5.2 or newer. It will not open in 4.x, including 4.2 LTS.

INSTALL

Unzip somewhere permanent, then Edit > Preferences > File Paths >

Asset Libraries > + and pick the folder. The nine metals appear in

the Asset Browser under Starting Frame > Metal. Drag one onto an

object. Or File > Append the .blend directly.

100% procedural. No AI. Nothing phones home.