Metal objects

[Julhelm]

I'd like to learn some techniques for making realistic metal textures, thank you.

[Salido]

You can scan all types of things to make some of the greatest textures. Scan pocket-watches,(moving gears), pictures of things in a magazine or your own personal pictures. Anything that you are willing to put on your scanner bed, can be used as texture, or as a layer.
Example: Place a picture of a metallic surface or something small enough to be placed on the glass scanner bed(Use your better judgement on heavy things), scan, save as a bitmap or gif, etc and you have just made a texture. Then if you want, you can take that same texture and modify by its color, contrtast,shape,etc..., through a Photo editing program!(PSP,PS,Ulead,Zbrush)


There are plenty off 3D sites that offer metallic textures, but I am sure, yours will be much better.
Examples: Hammered Metal serving trays,chrome fixtures,pictures of machine's up close, siding on homes, cables and wires, and the list never ends!

[LittleFish]

And after you have your pictures, then have a look at the "Custom Brushes" tutorial #3 about painting leather (on 3DTotal, under the 2d painting section). (The other two Custom Brushes tutorials should be helpful as well.)

edit: along with: (3DTotal)
2D Painting/PS:
Worn, Painted Metal Surface by Arild Wiro
Worn metal tutorial by Mike Rickard
"Dirty' Custom Brushes" by Krishnamurti M. Costa (maybe)
"Texturing 101" by Dave Wilson
Softimage XSI:
"UNIT 35" by Stephane Israel
Project Overviews:
"The Making of S.C.A.R.A.B" by Rory Woodford
... and there may be a couple more there too.

[Ceccotti]

Also to generate a metal like texture in photoshop.

Select two gray colours one darker then the other. Then Render/Clouds.

Then go to Artistic/Sponge Set the values to 0,0,1.

Then finally go to image/brightness and contrast set it to -15,-65.

And there you have a good base metal texture. You then can use the techniques of blending photos into it to make it look more realistic ect.

[Goig!]

Appart from the colour map you should create a shinniness map for a good metal texture, make it a grey scale map with variations where the metal is rusted (darker) or polished (lighter). And here comes a nice trick, use the same map, but inverted on your glossiness channel.
Also the values for shininess should be high and the values for glossiness should be low, something like 180-20 in Max, for example.

[Smack Monkey]

Also for metal materials reflections are realy important. In reality things reflect more the more oblique they are to the surface that is reflecting them. To mimic this use a falloff map in the reflection so that things that are straigh in fron of the metalic objects reflect less than things that are off to the side.