materialpersist

Materialpersist is an open‑source software library designed to enable reliable, long‑term storage of material definitions used in three‑dimensional graphics and computational design workflows. The library provides a lightweight, cross‑platform API that serialises material properties—such as colour, specular highlights, roughness, texture maps, and shader parameters—into a portable binary or JSON format. These persisted representations can be loaded at runtime by rendering engines, game engines, or CAD applications, ensuring that material data remains consistent across sessions, version changes and distributed development environments.

The project originated in 2018 when a group of game‑engine developers at the University of Technological Design identified the need for a standard method of caching custom shaders and material presets across large collaborative pipelines. Materialpersist was first released under the MIT licence and subsequently integrated into popular tools such as Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, and Autodesk Fusion 360 through plugins and Python extensions. Its core functions include material hashing for deduplication, version control hooks to track changes, and a simple API for querying and updating material attributes.

Materialpersist stores material data in a relational format backed by SQLite for small projects, or in a NoSQL document store for enterprise‑scale deployments. The binary format supports compression and optional encryption. Developers can import and export materials in formats compatible with industry standards such as glTF, OBJ, and FBX, allowing seamless interchange between different engines and pipelines.

Typical use cases for Materialpersist include: (1) synchronising material libraries between content creation teams; (2) batch updating shader parameters during a rendering farm job; (3) ensuring deterministic shader behaviour in procedural material generation; and (4) providing a canonical source of truth for material metadata in compliance with design production workflows. Materialpersist continues to evolve, with contributors adding support for physically‑based rendering pipelines, metallic‑roughness workflows, and runtime shader permutation generation.