Hello Chris,

Check out Gary Priester's tutorial for Gold and Chrome. It was written for an older version of the program but the technique still works wonderfully.

If you use the Advanced Find on the forum and search for the word chrome in the Xara X forum you will find many posts with various techniques for chrome. A couple of examples are:http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=8932
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=16040
be sure to download the sigtutorial.xar file in one of Big Frank's posts.

I haven't done a search for brushed metal, but I do recall there were several discussions with examples.