How to build a Shader for Anodized Aluminium I have modelled this smart phone based on Iphone 6 reference images. The rendered image of the back of the phone looks like this:



If I look at real life images of this "Iphone 6 Space Gray" I feel that "my phone" misses some fine grain and a "metal sheen". Like these images

 



My shader looks like this (like suggested here)



I would like to build a shader that gives a realistic look of the apple iPhone space gray material. I also had a look here ... this shader is based on an anisotropic shader which I feel that should be the way to go. It also has the fine grain ... but I don't think it is the solution (and this is also too complicated for me; I would like to understand it). So .. how to build a realistic shader for this apple material ?

Concerning the proposed solutions: I really like the solution suggested by PGmath. When applying his material to my iPhone this is the result. 



As I am intrigued by Physically Based shaders I picked up the suggestion of Paul Brachmann and proposed a PBS based solution using the work of PGmath
Here's what I have come up with.



The shader consists of a little bit of diffuse mixed into some fairly rough gloss, with a smoother Fresnel gloss mixed in at the end.  I also noticed that the gloss on you reference image has a very slight, yet distinct, variation in reflectance across the phone.  To simulate this I added a noise texture controlling the roughness of the two glossy shaders.

Here is my node layout:


Click to enlarge.

A few notes:


I am using Geometry > Position as mapping coordinates for the noise texture to get even scaling.  Using generated coordinates on an object with a non-cuboidal bounding box results in stretching.
I use an RGB Curves node to bump up the contrast.
All the math nodes just remap the [0,1] range of the texture to the desired ranges for the glossy roughnesses.
The colors in the above node layout are for the gold shader on the right of the render.  The silver one just uses grey in all 3 shaders (light grey for the glosses and slightly darker for the diffuse).