What, fundamentally, is wrong with my metal texture?

Question

I've been working on a metal texture. The key, it seems, it so mix the glossy type with the diffuse type; and of course there are various other things you can do (like bump-mapping.) I was wondering if someone among you could be so kind as to tell me why my metal looks like shiny plastic, I just can't get it right.

Eh, this was supposed to be some sort of light-saber variant. Here is a copy of my sheet:

What I'm really asking is what to look for. I've tried about 100 variations on this and I still can't quite nail it down.

The blend file is here.

Answer 1

I think that if you switch your mix shader to around .14, that should help for sure. Your lighting, from looking at your .blend, may also be part of it. I've had trouble before with similar lighting set ups, and have found it to be easier to set an area lamp with a wide angle and high emission to get the lighting and reflectivity that I need for my scene. I didn't have a lot of time to render something out, so this is low samples. With higher samples, and a clamp indirect value of 1 ( to eliminate fireflies), it should look ok.

Answer 2

My experience with metals has been that you need to include much less diffuse and much more glossy. I would try setting your factor value to something more around 0.05, or less.

In fact, if you're going for something more shiny I would try simply a glossy shader, with a roughness of about 0.05.

Result

Node setup

Hope this helped.

Answer 3

Amount of reflection for metals is much higher sRGB 155-255, (lower for gold,brass,copper and higher for aluminium and silver). So this color should be connected to mix shader and color of glossiness, because usually it's also color of reflections itself (eg. light orange for gold)