Nine procedural metals for Blender — brushed aluminum, brushed steel, gunmetal, polished chrome, gold, copper, scratched steel, rusty steel and shipwreck. The thing that makes this pack different is a decision you can check: the brushed grain does not use Blender's Anisotropic socket, because EEVEE ignores it. The grain is a stretched directional noise driving the roughness channel instead, so the elongated highlight renders in EEVEE the way you expect it to. Built and tuned for EEVEE, with the render cost published.
If you only read one section, read 04. Metal is almost pure reflection, so a metal material in an empty scene reads as a flat grey box no matter how good it is. That is the single most common "is this broken?" moment with any metal pack, and it takes about ten seconds to fix.
Two ways in. The first is the proper one and takes about thirty seconds; the second is the shortcut if you just want a material in this file and don't care about a library.
Unzip SF-Metal-Pack-v1.zip somewhere you'll keep it — not your Downloads folder, since Blender is going to point at this folder from now on. Something like Documents/Blender/Assets/SF-Metal/.
Edit → Preferences → File Paths → Asset Libraries → + (the plus button), then pick the unzipped folder — the folder, not the .blend inside it. Give it a name if you like. Close Preferences; Blender remembers this forever.
Change any editor to Asset Browser (the editor-type dropdown in the corner of any area — the little grid icon), then pick your library from the dropdown at the top-left. The nine metals are filed under Starting Frame → Metal.
Quickest way to get one: split the timeline at the bottom of the default layout and switch it to Asset Browser. You don't need a fancy workspace.
File → Append → browse into SF_Metal_Pack_v1.blend → Material → pick the one you want. It lands in the current file and you assign it in the Material Properties tab like any other material. Or just open SF_Metal_Pack_v1.blend and take what you want.
Route B is per-file. Route A means every future project already has them.
From the Asset Browser, drag a metal straight onto your object in the 3D viewport. That's the whole interaction. Switch the viewport to Material Preview or Rendered (the sphere icons, top-right of the viewport) to see it.
Open SF_Metal_Pack_v1.blend itself and you get all nine metals, each on its own beveled block, lit by Blender's own default light on a neutral floor with a 50 mm camera framing the lot. Nothing is borrowed from another file and there is nothing to set up. Use it as a reference for what the sliders do, then delete it — the materials are independent of the scene.
Why beveled blocks and not spheres: chamfered edges catch a reflection along the arris, which is where brushed grain, scratches and edge rust actually show. A sphere hides all three.
Blender's Principled BSDF has Anisotropic and Anisotropic Rotation sockets, and they are the obvious way to build brushed metal. They are also Cycles-only. EEVEE accepts them, renders, and silently produces generic soft metal with no directional highlight — no error, no warning, just a worse image.
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 layered on top. EEVEE renders all of that normally, so the elongated highlight smearing along the grain is there in the viewport and in the final frame.
The trade, stated plainly: 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.
Metal is very nearly pure reflection. It has almost no colour of its own — what you see when you look at chrome is the room. Put a perfect chrome material in a scene with an empty world and no other geometry and it will render as a flat grey box, because there is genuinely nothing for it to show you. This is not a fault in the material and it is not specific to this pack; it catches everyone at least once.
The fix, in rough order of effort: add an HDRI to the world (World Properties → Color → Environment Texture); or drop a large bright plane just out of frame for it to catch; or simply put other objects near it. Any of the three turns a grey box into metal.
Chrome and gold are the most sensitive because they are the most reflective. The rusted, scratched and brushed variants are far more forgiving — their roughness breaks the reflection up, so they read as metal even in a bare scene. If you are testing the pack for the first time, start with Scratched Steel or Rusty Steel, not chrome.
The nine variants are starting points, not the whole pack. Every one is the same handful of controls at different settings, and the range is much wider than the presets suggest.
Brushed Amount sets how strongly the grain shows. Streak Scale sets how fine it is, Streak Contrast how hard the transition between light and dark lines is, and Streak Bump adds physical relief on top of the roughness variation.
Watch out for Streak Scale. The frequency is multiplicative with the stretch, so pushing the scale far up takes the grain below one pixel and it stops reading as brushing and starts reading as noise. If the grain has turned to sparkle, bring Streak Scale down, not up.
Scratch Amount and Scratch Scale add clustered wear lines that both brighten and roughen where they land — scratches on real metal expose fresh material and scatter light, so they do both at once rather than just darkening.
Rust Amount and Rust Scale grow ragged oxide patches. Where the rust takes hold the surface stops being metal at all — it goes dielectric, matte and crusted. That switch is what actually reads as corrosion; a brown tint on a still-metallic surface reads as painted metal instead.
Rust Color and Rust Color 2 let the patches vary between fresh orange and old brown. Shipwreck is this dial taken all the way.
Coat Weight and Coat Roughness lacquer the surface — a clear layer over the metal, for anything that would have been sprayed or sealed. Rough Variation breaks up an otherwise perfectly even roughness so large flat panels don't read as CG.
Measured, not estimated. EEVEE at 1920×1080, 64 TAA samples, median of three runs, against a plain Principled material on the same shot and the same machine.
| Shot | Plain material | SF Metal | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nine objects in frame | 1.608 s | 2.258 s | +40.4% |
| One object filling the frame | 1.340 s | 2.474 s | +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 there so you know the ceiling, not because it is typical. 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.
Hover over a slider and press Backspace — but know what that does. It returns the slider to the generator's base value, not to the value the variant shipped with. All nine metals share one node group, so a reset cannot know which of the nine you meant. Reset gold and you get generic metal, not gold.
That is why the Asset Browser is the real undo. Drag a fresh copy in and you get a clean instance of that variant. Nothing you change is permanent, and nothing you change touches the file you downloaded.
Built and verified in Blender 5.2. It will not open in Blender 4.x, including 4.2 LTS — that's a Blender file-format change, not something the pack can work around. You need 5.2 or newer.
Every value in this pack was judged, gated and optimised in EEVEE, on a laptop. That is deliberate: if we cannot comfortably render it, neither can you. It renders in Cycles and nothing in it is Cycles-incompatible — but it was not tuned there and it will look different. Treat Cycles as untuned territory.
The materials are 100% procedural — no image textures in the shaders, no scans, no AI, nothing that phones home. Nothing to unpack, no texture folder to keep beside the file, and no missing-file surfaces when you move the .blend. The whole pack is 2.6 MB.
Render whatever you like, commercially or not, and sell the result. No credit required, no royalties. The only thing off the table is repackaging the materials themselves and redistributing them as your own pack. The full terms are in LICENSE.txt in the zip.
Buy it once, use it in everything you make. No subscription, no account needed to render, nothing that expires.