SF Metal — procedural metal materials for Blender
Nine procedural metals — brushed aluminum, brushed steel, gunmetal, polished chrome, gold, copper, scratched steel, rusty steel and shipwreck. Most brushed-metal shaders lean on Blender's Anisotropic socket, which EEVEE ignores outright: the material loads, renders, and quietly comes out as generic soft metal with no grain. These are built the other way round — the brushed grain is a directional streak field in the roughness channel itself, so the elongated highlight survives in the engine most people actually work in. Built and tuned for EEVEE, with the render cost published.
$29 one-time · 2.6 MB · Blender 5.2+ · built and tuned for EEVEE · 100% procedural materials, no AI
Nine metals, one node group — polished through brushed through wrecked, and the grain survives the trip into EEVEE.
Blender's Anisotropic and Anisotropic Rotation sockets are Cycles-only. EEVEE reads them and does nothing, which is why so much brushed metal comes out as a flat grey box with no warning. SF Metal never touches those sockets. 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 — so you get the elongated highlight smearing along the grain in pure EEVEE.
Brushed aluminum, brushed steel, gunmetal, polished chrome, gold, copper, scratched steel, rusty steel and shipwreck — every one an instance of a single procedural node group. Brushed Amount, Streak Scale, Streak Contrast and Streak Bump drive the grain; Scratch Amount and Scale add clustered wear lines that brighten and roughen; Coat Weight lacquers it.
Rust Amount and Rust Scale grow ragged oxide patches that go dielectric, matte and crusted — metal stops being metal where the rust takes hold, which is what actually reads as corrosion. Two rust colours let the patches vary between fresh orange and old brown. Shipwreck is that dial taken to the end.
EEVEE at 1920×1080, 64 TAA samples, median of three runs, against a plain Principled material on the same shot: +40.4% with the objects in frame, +84.6% at full-frame coverage. The node group is 42 nodes against a 60-node ceiling. Nobody publishes these numbers, so there they are.
Yes, and that is the entire reason this pack exists. Blender's Anisotropic and Anisotropic Rotation sockets are Cycles-only — EEVEE accepts them and renders nothing, so a brushed shader built on them silently degrades to generic soft metal. SF Metal exposes no anisotropy socket anywhere. The grain is built in the roughness channel as a heavily stretched directional noise, which EEVEE renders normally, so the elongated highlight is there in the viewport and in the final frame.
Almost certainly nothing in the material — metal is very nearly pure reflection, so in a scene with an empty world and no objects around it there is simply nothing for it to reflect and it reads as flat. This catches people constantly and it is not specific to this pack. Give it something to see: an HDRI, a bright plane out of frame, or any other geometry nearby. Chrome and gold are the most sensitive because they are the most reflective; the rusted and brushed variants are the most forgiving.
Measured in EEVEE at 1920×1080, 64 TAA samples, taking the median of three runs against a plain Principled material on the same shot: +40.4% with the nine objects in frame, and +84.6% with a single object filling the frame. Those two numbers are both real and they are not comparable to each other — the second is the worst case, a screen entirely covered in the material. The group is 42 nodes against the 60-node budget.
It renders in Cycles and nothing in it is Cycles-incompatible — but it was built and tuned for EEVEE and it will look different there. Worth knowing: because the grain is roughness-driven rather than anisotropy-driven, Cycles will not give you true anisotropic highlights from this pack. That is a deliberate trade. The pack is aimed at people working EEVEE-first, and it buys a grain that renders everywhere over a grain that renders in one engine.
No. These are .blend node groups you drag from the Asset Browser or bring in with File → Append. There is nothing to install, nothing to enable in Preferences, and no image textures to keep beside your file — the materials are filed under Starting Frame → Metal.
No, and this catches people in the first minute. All nine metals share one node group, so Reset restores the generator's base value rather than the value your variant shipped with — reset gold and you get generic metal, not gold. The Asset Browser is the real undo: drag a fresh copy in and you get a clean instance of that variant, with the one you tuned left untouched.
Blender 5.2 or newer. The file is saved by 5.2 LTS and will not open in any 4.x release, including 4.2 LTS. That is a Blender file-format change, not something the pack can work around.
Yes. Renders, animations and projects you make with the pack are yours outright, for any commercial use, with no attribution and no obligation. The pack itself is for your own use under the included license — keep LICENSE.txt with your copy. The one thing off the table is repackaging the materials themselves and redistributing them as your own pack.
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