How to Make a Brushed Metal Material in UE5
Brushed metal is defined by its directionality — thousands of parallel micro-scratches from machining. In PBR terms that means anisotropic highlights: reflections stretch across the brushing direction instead of forming round hotspots.
Channel by channel
Base color
Nearly flat: a single grey (aluminum ~0.91 linear, darker for gunmetal looks) with only the faintest streak variation. Brushed metal’s detail lives almost entirely outside the albedo.
Roughness
Low-to-mid (0.25–0.45) with a fine directional streak texture. The streaks in roughness are what elongate the highlight even without true anisotropy support.
Metallic
1.0, full stop. Any dip toward grey-dielectric kills the metallic read.
Normal
Extremely subtle directional lines — at most a whisper. Overdriven brushing normals turn the surface into corduroy.
The hand-building tip that matters
In Unreal, set the Anisotropy input (0.7–0.9) and feed a Tangent direction to align the highlight with the brushing — the Substrate/standard shading models both support it and it beats faking the effect with roughness alone.
New to the four channels? Read the PBR basics first.
Or generate it in seconds
MaterialForge builds this material for you — seamless textures, derived PBR maps and the UE5 node graph, applied into your open editor in one click. The prompt is prefilled:
Generate “brushed metal” in MaterialForgePrompt variations to try
Applying into your editor happens through the free Cosindra desktop app (Windows & macOS).