As @brecht said, the main benefit of MaterialX seems to be interoperability, and now the MaterialX is going to be supported in UnrealEngine 5 (5.1 to be exact, see ROADMAP: https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/80-unreal-engine-5-1-in-progress ), I think now is the right time to revive this feature request. USD support has developed to a good stage both in Unreal and Blender, and I have recently switched over to USD workflow completely/mostly.
Also, btw I heard in the OSL stack server, that GPU support is coming soon.
Iâm waiting for the day, when I can make my materials in Blender, and export them to Unreal, without any hitch.
I just thought Iâd share some extra information that may or might not be useful.
Brian Savery (and possibly others) are currently working on adding a âMaterial-Xâ add-on to Blender in combination with other changes related to adding support for Hydra render delegates.
It should be noted, based on my understanding of this, the âMaterial-X add-onâ wonât add Material-X support to Cycles. Instead it just exposes a Material-X shader editor for use with supported Hydra render delegates. There also appear to be plans in place to implement a system that converts Cycles materials to Material-X materials. However, the conversion the other way (Material-X to Cycles) or adding support for Material-X natively is a longer term project.
At the moment there is a patch currently in the review process that adds OSL support to OptiX, with Patrick Mours trying to keep the implementation as âplatform agnostic as possibleâ so other GPU rendering backends could potentially be added in the future with relative ease. https://developer.blender.org/D15902
Indeed if Cycles supports OSL in all the GPU backends this would be another route to support MaterialX. However this wouldnât solve the EEVEE problem.
This sums it up pretty well. The MaterialX nodes are a bit more basic than the Blender nodes so Blender to MaterialX is more straightforward.