Materialist is a lightweight material manager for Autodesk® Maya® that puts everyday shading tasks in one place - no more hunting through the Hypershade or Outliner for routine look-development work. It is designed for artists working in heavy production scenes: fast to open, fast to filter, and safe to use mid-production.

BROWSE

• List all materials in the scene with one click.
• Search materials by name, filter to only materials with a shading group, and limit the list by namespace - so the right shader is always a few keystrokes away, even in scenes with hundreds of materials.

ASSIGN AND SELECT

• Assign the selected material to the current viewport selection (objects or faces) with one click.
• Select the material of the selected object to find out what an object is using.
• Select all objects with the selected material - ideal for auditing look-dev scenes.
• Transfer material assignments from one object to another, keeping face-level assignments intact.

EDIT

• Create a new material of any registered shader type and assign it to the selection in one step.
• Duplicate a material together with its complete upstream shading network, so variations never share texture nodes by accident.
• Delete a material cleanly, including its shading group.

CLEANUP

• Delete unused nodes: remove materials and shading groups with no assignments in one pass.
• Merge duplicate file texture nodes that bloat the scene after imports and references.
• Batch rename shading groups to match their material names for a tidy Hypershade.

EXPORT AND IMPORT

• Export selected materials, with their full shading networks, to a file for reuse in other scenes or handoff to teammates.
• Import a previously exported shader file and optionally assign the materials to the current selection in one step.

DIAGNOSTICS

• Find objects that are still on the initial shading group.
• Find objects with no shader assigned at all - a quick sanity check before rendering or publishing.

Materialist is script-only (pure Python) - no compiled binaries, no external dependencies, and nothing written outside the package folder. It installs as a standard Autodesk Application Package and adds a single icon button to Maya's Custom shelf. It works with Maya's built-in materials as well as any registered third-party shader types (Arnold, V-Ray, Redshift, and others). MIT-licensed; full source code is available on GitHub.