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 start with a material brief
MaterialForge generates a UE5 material recipe, with seamless textures and derived PBR maps where needed. Preview the result, then apply it through the desktop app. This link prefills your prompt:
Try “brushed metal” in MaterialForgePrompt variations to try
Applying into your editor happens through the free Cosindra desktop app (Windows & macOS).
Want alternatives or a set of different surfaces? Follow the MaterialForge workflow →
Common questions
How do I get stretched anisotropic highlights on brushed metal in UE5?
Feed 0.7–0.9 into the material’s Anisotropy input and supply the brushing direction through the Tangent input — a constant vector works for straight brushing. UE5’s Default Lit shading model supports this natively and elongates the specular hotspot across the scratch direction, which beats trying to fake the stretch with directional roughness streaks alone.
Why does my brushed aluminum render as dull gray plastic?
Almost always a metallic problem: any value below 1.0 mixes in dielectric response and kills the metal read. Set Metallic to a Constant 1.0, keep the base color near 0.91 linear gray for aluminum, and hold roughness in the 0.25–0.45 band. Also check that the gray was not authored too dark — aluminum albedo is brighter than most people expect.
How do I make radial or circular brushing, like a machined disc?
The tangent must rotate around the center instead of pointing one way. Subtract 0.5 from TexCoord to center the UVs, rotate the resulting vector 90 degrees (swap the components and negate one), normalize it, and plug that into the Tangent input. Each pixel’s highlight then stretches along the circular brushing path, producing the sunburst reflection of a turned disc.