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I need help, making a realistic looking aluminum material, like in the pictures below. I would like to only use procedural textures within Cycles. No external image textures. Can anybody, who figures out, how to make this aluminium material,to post his node setup, so, I can see how you did it. I wasn't able to do it, even after searching up online.

The pictures of what I would like the material to look like are shown below.

enter image description here

And

enter image description here

And

enter image description here

Thank You!

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  • $\begingroup$ I would look at the Anisotropic shader. $\endgroup$
    – PGmath
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 4:37

2 Answers 2

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Here's my latest render. I'm not fully satisfied with it yet, but it's close.

enter image description here

Here is the node setup:

enter image description here
Click to enlarge.

It's basically an Anisotropic shader with a little bit of straight gloss, then a very light Fresnel component. I then used a stretched noise texture to mix in a very small amount of diffuse (to make some cracks more pronounced) and apply a bump. I've also created the below node group for a very fine grain, which is also used for bump mapping.

enter image description here

Note: the Translate and Scale group nodes are homemade equivalents of the corresponding parts of the mapping node. They are explained here.

Like I said, I'm not quite happy with it yet. In particular the flat end needs better texture coordinates for a circular bump (I'm having trouble creating a procedural radial blur) and the inside needs less anisotropy.

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  • $\begingroup$ It needs Fresnel. $\endgroup$
    – Ascalon
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 6:12
  • $\begingroup$ I think it could use a little less roughness and you could probably also get rid of the diffuse, unless you think that there's really that amount of dust in the cracks which seems pretty unlikely to me given how new it looks. Also, it could really benefit from having a few larger-scale dings here and there. Maybe model them in and use a vertex color channel to easily mask them out--that way you still have plenty of control. The dings should have less roughness and less anisotropy given the photo reference. $\endgroup$
    – Spencer Brown
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 7:16
  • $\begingroup$ @Drudge The examples given are quite rough (on a microsurface level) and likewise don't exhibit much of a Fresnel effect. I've added a little bit in my recent tests though. $\endgroup$
    – PGmath
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 14:35
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    $\begingroup$ @fabriced It's shown in the second screenshot. $\endgroup$
    – PGmath
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 19:58
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    $\begingroup$ @fabriced it's a Color > Mix RGB node set to Multiply. $\endgroup$
    – PGmath
    Commented Feb 12, 2016 at 0:37
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You should use the Anisotropic shader and make sure that the reflectivity is around .9. Aluminum is a pretty bright metal.

You do need UVs on your model for the anisotropy to show up correctly. Blender uses the Tangent vector to calculate anisotropy, which is the vector in 3d space that corresponds to the vector pointing along the positive X-axis on your UV coordinates. Creating a UV layout is the easiest way to get this tangent vector, and you don't have to hook anything up to the Tangent input to use the tangents that are generated from your vertex normals and your UV layout.

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    $\begingroup$ If you also use a Layer Weight or a Fresnel Node to mix the shaders, combined with a math pow node and a Color Ramp or Curves node you will get a pretty much accurate result. On the first image it seems also that there is some sort of color variation due to dirt or to the lack of purity of the material. You can also use noise texture for the color and roughness or even an image texture to give more realism. $\endgroup$
    – Jorge Losilla Martínez
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 8:49

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