[Metal] Brushed Textures

Brushed metal is defined by one property that a colour map alone cannot deliver: the highlight is stretched. Because the surface carries thousands of parallel micro-scratches, light smears into a band running perpendicular to the grain rather than gathering into a round spot. That is anisotropy, and it is the whole material. Get it wrong and you have a slightly noisy mirror. These tiles come from the photographic metal volumes, scanned from real ground and worked sheet, so the grain direction and its irregularities are already correct.

License

Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required. Commercial games, film, broadcast, print, product design and client work are all permitted. No credit, no backlink, no permission request needed. You may not resell or redistribute the texture files themselves as a texture pack.

What's in this collection

• Fine linear brush — the even directional grain used on appliances, fittings and consumer hardware.
• Coarse ground and worked — heavier tool marks with visible arcs and overlapping passes from grinding and polishing.
• Scratched service metal — flat sheet with accumulated handling scratches running in several directions rather than one clean grain.
• Warm-toned brushed — gold and bronze-tinted variants for fittings and premium product work.

All tiles are seamless in both directions and delivered at high resolution.

Where brushed metal is used

Product visualisation. Appliances, laptops, watch cases and kitchen fittings, where brushed steel signals quality and is almost always shot close under hard light.

Architectural visualization. Lift interiors, handrails, kitchen splashbacks and ironmongery, where the grain direction is a specified detail.

Game props. Weapons, tools and equipment casings, where a directional grain immediately separates a manufactured object from raw material.

Motion graphics. Backgrounds and title plates where a light sweeping along the grain does the animation without any other movement.

How to use these in Blender

1. Set Metallic to 1.0 and connect the colour map to Base Color, then drive Roughness from the supplied map rather than a constant.
2. Raise the Anisotropic value on the Principled BSDF and set Anisotropic Rotation so the stretch runs perpendicular to the grain. Without this the material is just a rough mirror.
3. Use a Tangent node set to UV Map so the anisotropy follows the object's UVs rather than an arbitrary world direction.
4. Keep Bump very weak. Brush marks are microns deep and heavy relief turns a fitting into corrugated sheet.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on and roughness and normal maps with sRGB off.
2. Set Metallic to 1 and use the anisotropy input with a tangent map so highlights stretch correctly along the grain.
3. Align UVs so the grain runs the length of the object. Brushed grain running across a handle instead of along it is one of the most visible material errors there is.
4. Place a Reflection Capture or rely on Lumen, since brushed metal is still reflective enough to look dead in an empty environment.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Metallic at 1 and a smoothness map inverted from the supplied roughness texture.
2. For proper anisotropy, use a custom Shader Graph; the standard lit shader will approximate brushed metal but will not stretch the highlight.
3. Add a Detail Normal Map at high tiling so the individual brush lines survive at close camera range.
4. Place a Reflection Probe in the space, since flat ambient lighting turns brushed steel into grey card.

Tips for brushed metal specifically

The highlight must stretch. If your specular is a round dot, the anisotropy is not set up, and no amount of adjusting roughness will fix it. This one setting is the difference between brushed steel and slightly rough chrome.

Keep one grain direction per face. A real component is ground in a single pass, so grain runs consistently across each face and changes only where a new surface begins. Mixing directions on one flat panel is an immediate tell that the texture was box-mapped without checking.

Polish where hands go. Handled brushed metal smooths and brightens along contact points, so handles, rims and edges sit noticeably glossier than the surfaces between them. Adding that wear mask is both physically correct and one of the cheapest ways to make a prop look used.

Browse the collection

Metal is organized into volumes, each containing multiple packs, alongside separate photographic and lettering volumes. New volumes are added continuously.

View the photographic metal volumes → · View the full Metal collection →

Related: Plastic textures, Crystal textures.