Glancing angle deposition (GLAD) uses an oblique deposition angle to exacerbate atomic shadowing during physical vapor deposition to create underdense layers consisting of nanorods with engineered shapes and three-dimensional composition variations. This growth process is intrinsically chaotic. However, initial substrate pattering combined with temporal changes in the deposition fluxes yield surprisingly regular nanostructure arrays. The questions about the theoretical minimum feature size as well as rod branching, merging, and broadening is discussed by presenting statistical morphology data from various metals deposited over a large temperature range. The rod width follows a power law scaling where the growth exponent depends linearly on the island nucleation length scale, but exhibits a discontinuity at 20% of the melting point, associated with a transition from a 2D to a 3D island growth mode. Different metals show excellent quantitative agreement when scaled to the melting point, yielding a single homologous activation energy of 2.46 for surface diffusion on curved nanorod growth fronts, applicable to all metallic systems at all temperatures. The onset of bulk diffusion near 50% of the melting point during such growth under exacerbated shadowing conditions leads to a direct transition from an underdense (zone I) structure to a dense (zone III) structure. Applications include nanostructured fuel cell electrodes, active components of nano pressure sensors, and lubricant transport channels for high-temperature self-lubrication.