Of all material surfaces, metals must be one of the most popular to appear in 3D design projects. Metals tend to be visually pleasing with brightly colored surfaces that will gleam when polished. They also exhibit fascinating surface detail due to oxidization and age-related weathering. Being malleable, these surfaces will dent and scratch to display their human interaction. All these issues mean that man-made metal objects are great objects to design outstanding material and texture surfaces within Blender.
It is possible in Blender to design metal surfaces using quite simple material setups. Although it may seem logical to create complex node-based solutions to capture all the complexity apparent within a metal surface, the standard Blender material arrangement can achieve all that is necessary to represent almost any metal.
Metals have their own set of unique criteria that need application within a material simulation. These include:
Wide specularity due to the nature of...