The Blender team is planning to put out a call for PBR materials that will ship with Blender in the near future. Having a varied library of materials will be great for a lot of reasons.

I was thinking though, I usually name my objects for what they are, and a general material is usually inferable from that description. In that case, it would be nice if it could automatically assign a material for me where it's clear.

Notes

• I don't tend to name my vertex groups for 'what' it is, but it wouldn't hurt to support it.

• This would require associating keywords with the materials. I think a comprehensive matrix can be created up-front and be updated with each new Blender release. I don't think it needs to be live.

• To provide more control, there may have to be light syntax so that you can determine which terms are used, such as 'bottle=blue_metal', where everything after '=' is used. I expect this to be controversial since naming conventions are controversial.

• You could override this matrix with your own keywords/materials. I imagine this would just be a basic csv file:

  [ a;b;c ][ material name ][ material url ]
  
  

Panel Functionality

• By default, it would be an action / button for manual control.
• Specify which objects to process:
  • Selected objects
  • Objects/groups without materials
  • All objects
• 'Override current materials'
• An 'update automatically' toggle that would activate whenever an object name or group name is set/changed.
• Advanced — Like CSS, allow for color words + dark/light to set the base color. The color-word to color-code could be overridden by the user matrix.
• Shared / Single — Whether each object gets its own copy of the material or shares it. Likely shared by default since it's easy to make it single user.

Why

• Minimal workflow disruption — You can just focus on modelling and only have to take a small extra effort to name your stuff well enough for a decent payoff. I know I usually name my objects later because it doesn't hurt anything atm, so I would just have to change that one habit (name it first). Then when you're ready to focus on materials, a starting point is already there for you.

But...

• Since there's a panel for the options, you may ask why not just make this a plug-in / prompt, as all it really does is keyword search/assignment for materials. You're probably right, I just felt that the effort already spent in naming objects could have an extra bonus, and could maybe help encourage better asset naming.