Create Anisotropic Brushed Metal in Blender

Creating a realistic brushed metal material in Blender involves utilizing the Principled BSDF shader's built-in anisotropic controls, setting appropriate roughness and metallic values, and defining the reflection direction using texture coordinates and tangent vectors. This guide covers the step-by-step process of configuring the shader nodes, controlling the highlight elongation, and adding subtle surface micro-scratches for photorealistic results.

Step 1: Base Shader Setup

  1. Open the Shader Editor with your object selected.
  2. Create a new material and ensure the Principled BSDF is connected to the Material Output.
  3. Set the Metallic value to 1.0.
  4. Set the Base Color to a light gray for metals like steel, chrome, or aluminum (or adjust to a yellowish tint for brass/gold).
  5. Set the Roughness to around 0.3 to 0.4. Anisotropic reflections require some roughness to become visible.

Step 2: Enable and Adjust Anisotropy

  1. In the Principled BSDF (in Blender 4.0 and newer), locate the Anisotropic property.
  2. Increase the Anisotropic value to 0.8 or 1.0. This stretches the specular highlight along a specific axis, simulating the micro-grooves of brushed metal.
  3. Adjust the Anisotropic Rotation value (between 0.0 and 1.0) to rotate the reflection angle by up to 360 degrees until it aligns with your object's geometry.

Step 3: Define the Tangent Direction

To ensure the reflections flow correctly across curved or complex surfaces:

  1. Press Shift + A and add a Tangent node.
  2. Set the Tangent node's direction type to UV Map and select your object's UV map.
  3. Connect the Tangent output of the Tangent node to the Tangent input of the Principled BSDF.
  4. Ensure your 3D model is properly UV unwrapped, as the brush direction will follow the layout and orientation of your UV islands.

Step 4: Add Micro-Scratch Texture (Optional)

To give the metal realistic physical grooves in addition to the optical effect:

  1. Add a Texture Coordinate node and a Mapping node (Shift + A).
  2. Connect the UV output of the Texture Coordinate node to the Vector input of the Mapping node.
  3. Add a Noise Texture node and connect the Mapping node's Vector output to it.
  4. On the Mapping node, scale one axis heavily (e.g., set X scale to 1.0 and Y scale to 50.0 or higher) to create elongated streaks.
  5. Add a Bump node. Connect the Color or Factor output of the Noise Texture to the Height input of the Bump node.
  6. Lower the Bump node's Distance to 0.001 and Strength to 0.1 to 0.2 to keep the effect subtle.
  7. Connect the Normal output of the Bump node to the Normal input of the Principled BSDF.

Step 5: Lighting the Scene

Anisotropic highlights require directional light sources or high-contrast environment maps (HDRIs) to be clearly visible. Add an HDRI background in the World shader or place strong area lights perpendicular to the brush direction to verify the highlight stretching in the Cycles render engine.