We need a way to easily pack materials for saving and sharing materials within Blender. I want to create and share materials but Blender makes this difficult.
I believe that if you simply give the materials a Fake User, they will persist in the file without being linked to any objects, so you should be able to stuff a bunch of them into a single .blend. And there is a Pack option for external textures used by such Materials, though this can bloat the .blend size pretty fast – File>External Data> Pack into .blend file… with a dialog of options. User prefs has an option to compress the file on saving, which can help with file bloat.
You can also create a group with the material nodes.
If you do that you can latter link them to a new project.
This way you can have a .blend material library and re-use the node groups whenever you want.
Great material by the way…
Thank you both very much