Learning Shading in Cycles Final

I decided to review the Fundamentals of Shading Course and starting riffing along with Kent as he went through how to use the node editor to texture the shader gizmo. I wanted to actually see how it all worked before I started fussing with the toy truck exercise, but didn't really have any of the textures Kent was using -- I got the orb from the retopology exercise file. So, I decided to try making my own textures and shading for the orb. The textures were all painted in Blender. I didn't bother replicating the decals on Kent's orb, because that wasn't the focus of what I was doing. The grime and scratches were procedurally produced, following a tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAtFHBzEqAI) I found on YouTube by JLampel (as Blender HD). I copied the lighting over from the fundamentals of shading download files and used a demo of Andrew Price's Pro Skies plugin to supplement it. As I got further into the whole process, I decided I wanted the little center orb and screws to actually show the anisotropic texture underneath. That required experimentation, more than anything else, until I figured out how best to create the alpha texture I needed to mix in to make it all work. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the result, given it's really the first time I've played extensively with Cycles. (And, given how dense the node paths are for this object, I think "extensive" is a good word for it.)