Modeled the stylius which I have for my iPad. The pen itself is actually made of metal… Any recommendations on how to create good stainless steel or metal textures/materials? I happen to have a picture of a metal “Texture” but when I use it, along with some other nodes, it never really looks great, even if I UV unwrap.
Do you have an image of the actual stylus? It would be far easier to suggest solutions if we had a reference image to go off.
A fairly simple light grey glossy shader - with reasonable roughness value (~0.4) would probably be sufficient.
The machine marks near the tip can probably be handled by applying a similar material just to those faces but with a small scaled bump map.
The tip material on your model is also wrong. There are plenty of black rubber materials floating round here, deviant art and blendswap - just have a look around.
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A few other issues.
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The body of the pen still looks off. It looks too white. My suggested roughness value was too high. Set the glossy node to GGX multiscattered and set a roughness value around 1.5.
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Your images looks over exposed - try toning down the lighting a bit. Also consider swicthing to ‘filmic’ colour management. I’d consider lighting your scene using a HDRI environment texture.
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Glossy materials often depend on having something to reflect. and adding some other geometry to allow the material to reflect something (e.g. a simple ground plane with a checker texture).
Here are some free HDRI environments that I found on the web:
https://www.deviantart.com/zbyg/art/HDRi-Pack-1-97402522
https://www.deviantart.com/zbyg/art/HDRi-Pack-2-103458406
https://www.deviantart.com/zbyg/art/HDRi-Pack-3-112847728
I did a quick mockup implementing the tips I suggested above and got this result.
