It would be great if when saving a scene, all scene materials are saved to a seperate xml/json file, so that on future imports, if an imported material name exists in the xml/json file, it’s non-importable parameters could be auto configured (reflection etc).
On saving you could have an option to overwrite existing material definitions, or save only new.
On opening an existing scene, you could get the option to update material definitions from library, or keep current.
This sounds like a similar request to the material library proposed by @tim.
You can achieve some of such reuse by making a copy of an existing scene with materials already configured, and updating such a copy with a new model (Update button in the main Shapespark window). The new model can have completely different geometry, during the update the original geometry will be dropped, but materials that have the same name in both models will keep the non-importable parameters.
After the update will the parameters of materials that are no longer in use be kept, or in my external 3d software would I first need to copy all new object/materials into a scene containing all historical object/materials, import from that one, then duplicate the shapespark folder (so there’s always a shapespark scene with everything ever created in it), and then re-import just the new models to end up with only the new scenes geometry/pre-configured materials?
No, the materials no longer in use are removed.
It doesn’t seem practical to try to use this mechanism to keep track of all materials ever used, but you could maintain a scene with most often used materials and always start from it.