Hi,
I’ve been struggling all day since yesterday… Please help. How to get such a surface of steel as in the attached photos? I have Cinema 4D R20 and can only use Classic V-Ray. I even started to create a pattern made of many offset circles in Adobe Illustrator for bump and specular maps, but the result is not satisfactory. I can’t send a 3D scene because it’s a confidential item.
I am asking for help and thank you.
Krzysztof Malec
Hello @krzysztof_malec
The first option is using Chaos Cosmos or V-Ray Scans and choosing from one of the numerous steel and metal materials available.
The second option is creating texture maps (bump and specular as mentioned) in a 3rd Party Software and using them via V-Ray Material in Cinema 4D.
Thank you for your answer. Here, an additional difficulty is the anisotropy of the surface, which is very irregular. I want to achieve anisotropy using a specular map, but I’m not very good at it, so I use a blend material with a separate anisotropic material and mix it with the material I make circles with.
What you could try is use the Reflection > Anisotropy feature of the V-Ray Material.
Regarding the blending, it is possible to avoid it by using a Bump map so some parts of the surface would reflect the light differently.
you need anisotropic textures for such things, bets also soem bump/normapmaps that fit you find some in our vray metal materials library (but not same) at 3dtools.info, but yu can also make that yourself in psd
Hi Stefan,
A very nice collection of materials. Thank you for sending the link. If you help me achieve a similar effect, I will buy your collection. 
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to experiment anymore. Each collection is missing the surface effect I am trying to achieve. All materials are repeatable. Here, the difficulty lies in the lack of regularity of the pattern and showing the exact surface characteristic of machining - milling. These are not microscopic flaws in the metal, this is the effect of the cutter’s work. There are no ready-made libraries with materials available here.
Hi Filip,
An equally beautiful collection of materials! 
I already bought it before. I’m trying to mix it up right now, but I’m not very good at it. :(
“If you help me achieve a similar effect, I will buy your collection.”
well i can help you, there is one irregular brushed material already a in it and i can edit it to your needs for example or create a new one. bets email me to: shop@3dtools.info
My thinking would be, to get 100% accuracy, you’d need to model this and make sure all the UV’s are correct direction and then in the ano filtering in the material set it to UV coordinates. This would give you 100% accurate result. You could use a texture map to drive the model with a displacer and then UV…the challenge there will be to UV it easily and accurately. VS modeling it you’d be able to select the edges and break it apart with your UV mapping more easily. We have some clients that are SUPER picky on this stuff so we’ve dealt with a ton of this lol
I have a 3D scanner, so if I had the original item I could try to scan the model. Unfortunately, such surfaces subjected to machining (milling) have a random texture, each time a different one. It is not a repeatable pattern. My client is not a purist (fortunately), but it would be nice to show him that you can get close to such a surface texture.
