I've tried and no matter what tweaking I do to the textures, I can't come up with anything that looks like stainless steel... Just wondering if anybody has had better luck doing this??

Silver works great. You may decrease the blurred reflections, so it becomes more shiny. You also can change the color a bit to a less or more grey. What kind of object is it? Guitta

I've seen stainless steel, like on knife blades, which is very smooth and shiny, but when used in kitchens or on hospital equipment it tends to be duller and sometimes a bit rough textured, with blurry reflections. You probably want a medium gray color with a white or yellow-white higlight about 80% or so and on the shiny side with slightly blurred reflections.

You need to add a bump map using the function editor in order to get a No. 4 mill finish, ie. brushed stainless steel.

One thing is the texture of the object, one other is the environment of the object; it becomes very important for reflective materials. Since the environment/light is reflected on the object, and produce the shining pattern. This obliges to modellise the environment even in case of still life (or use of surrounding image instead of environment). Just my 2 cents ;=) Yves

Right, it's the brushed look I'm going after and no matter what function I try, I get either a lousy something or other, or nothing resembling the look of brushed stainless steel... I should have added that part, sorry... :) thanks for all your responses... I'll try some of these suggestions In this particular case, it would be a metal object resting on a table... I haven't quite decided what it'll be, but the metal has that brushed stainless steel effect, I still can't quite get with the functions...

What about using an image of stainless steel as your material, as opposed to the normal procedural texture method? They work really well ;)

Sacred Rose is right. That would be the best way to achieve your effect. You can use the image for the texture and for the bump function. Just make sure your gain is set very low so it doesn't create canyons instead of a brushed look. : )

Thanks, I'll definitely try that... I just figured there might have been an easy way in the texture editor...

yup...easy as pie. Right click the default texture to edit, select mapped value, import oldstainlesssteel.jpg/bmp , right click bump to edit, select mapped value, import same oldstainlesssteel.jpg/bmp, adjust depth of bump..( you can try inverting image if u like just 4 the bump) save both bump and new texture as one or save each individually ~ to use the bump without the texture ~ all done! ~b :))