Enriching Data with Mudstack Custom Attributes

Josef Bell

Josef Bell / Lead Product Manager

Enriching Data with Mudstack Custom Attributes

Every team has production data that does not fit into a fixed metadata model. It ends up in spreadsheets, naming conventions, comments, and side conversations. With Custom Attributes, Mudstack lets teams attach the data they actually need directly to files, assets, and projects.

That means teams can model more of their real workflow inside Mudstack, from Poly Count and Color Space to Asset Status, AI provenance, and project-specific material data.

Why Custom Attributes matter

Standard metadata gives teams a consistent foundation for organizing files and assets. But real production workflows always need more. Teams need to track details that are specific to a project, asset type, customer, pipeline, or review process. That information is often essential, but it usually lives outside the system.

Custom Attributes bring that context into Mudstack.

Instead of forcing teams into a rigid schema, Custom Attributes give teams a structured way to store the data that actually matters to their workflow and keep it connected to the work itself.

Standard metadata vs. Custom Attributes

Standard metadata covers the basics that apply across files and assets.

Custom Attributes cover the fields that matter to your team.

For example, standard metadata may tell you who updated a file and when. Custom Attributes let you track things like:

  • Production state
  • Creator or owner
  • AI provenance
  • Technical specs
  • Gameplay values
  • Licensing data
  • Material data
  • Project-specific tags and IDs

Standard metadata gives you consistency. Custom Attributes add flexibility.

What teams can track with Custom Attributes

Custom Attributes are designed to support different kinds of production data without forcing teams into one mode, using fields that are meaningful to your team instead of forcing everything into generic naming conventions.

Technical attributes

Teams can attach technical fields directly to assets, including examples like:

  • Poly Count
  • Image Height and Width
  • Color Space
  • Material Count
  • Animation Length
  • Frame Rate

This makes it easier to organize content by complexity, spot outliers, and support optimization or review workflows without relying on external tracking. This information can be pulled from files by creating plugins that can extract the data when Mudstack sees the file.

Workflow and provenance attributes

Custom Attributes are also useful for production and operational context, such as:

  • Asset Status like Draft, In Review, or Approved
  • Creator, whether that means a specific artist, a team, or a vendor
  • Provenance Markers like Human-Created, AI-Assisted, or AI-Generated
  • Sourcing Distinctions like In-House vs. Outsourced
  • Ticket IDs to external task management systems
  • Links to external places where your team does review

These fields help teams filter work by status, ownership, source, and review stage.

Interactive and gameplay attributes

For game teams, assets often carry gameplay-relevant data. Custom Attributes can support fields such as:

  • Damage Value
  • HP
  • Move Speed
  • Item Categories
  • Destructibility Flags
  • Gameplay-related Tags tied to implementation or balance

That gives teams a lightweight way to keep production context and gameplay context closer together.

Material attributes

In building design and construction, it’s important to capture the real-world significance of data associated with assets. Custom Attributes can help by attaching material type, finish, manufacturer, or project-specific classification or specification data directly to files in a materials library or design workflow.

File relationships

Custom Attributes can also be used as a lightweight way to track relationships between files. For example, teams might use them to indicate that certain textures belong to a character, or that a file is associated with a specific material set or project component. That is only a first step, but it already makes it easier to preserve important context.

What kinds of data can teams store?

Custom Attributes are useful not just because teams can define their own fields, but because those fields can represent different kinds of data.

Examples include:

  • Text / String for notes, labels, or tags Example: Tags = "wood, destructible"
  • Boolean for true/false flags Example: IsActive = true, HasTransparency = false
  • Number for integer or decimal values Example: PolyCount = 12450
  • Date for review cycles, deadlines, or milestones Example: ReviewDueDate = 2026-04-15
  • Dropdown / Enum for predefined choices Example: TeamAssignment = Environment, AssetStatus = Approved

This makes Custom Attributes flexible enough for both lightweight tagging and more structured production data. Tags can be set as filterable to help match your studio’s search needs.

Use Cases for Custom Attributes

Custom attributes can be used in a number of automated ways to help pass data both into and out of Mudstack. Here are a few examples your team could implement.

Collect DCC file metadata for quick review of a file

  • When a file is created or a new version is created, have a plugin run a process to ask Maya for polycount, material count, and bone count
  • Write those values to the Poly Count, Material Count, and Bone Count attributes
  • For art leads, they no longer need to open the file to quickly check these attributes during review

Pull in an external reference table and apply it to files

  • If you have a table of information in an external database, you can collect that information and use our API to keep that data synchronized as a dropdown selection in Mudstack on files
  • For licensing data, you can use our API to create a schema draft, update the Licensing Data attribute’s selection list, then validate and promote the change to your team.
  • The validation step will help you identify if you change will impact files that use the values you are attempting to edit.
  • After promoting the change, your team can now use the new information to modify and filter against that new custom data.

Keep producers up to date on any communication in Mudstack

  • Push a change with the issue key in the Push title
  • Use Mudstack’s webhook to send the commit event to Jira
    • Jira can use that data to generate a comment on the issue and move it from In Progress to In Review if it sees the file is ready for review in Mudstack
    • Assign the reviewers on the file in Mudstack to the issue in Jira
  • For each uploaded file, append the issue key to the custom attribute Jira Ticket on the files that were in the Push
  • Any time your team now interacts with that file, the events can also be replicated in Jira with Webhooks and the API

Why this helps teams

Better structure leads to better visibility. Custom Attributes can help your team:

Organize and search more effectively

Teams can filter and group content using fields that reflect how they actually work, whether that is status, vendor, asset complexity, provenance, material type, or gameplay category.

Improve reporting and analysis

Once important context is stored as structured data, it becomes much easier to answer questions like:

  • Which assets are still in draft?
  • Which outsourced files still need review?
  • Which assets exceed a target poly count?
  • Which content was AI-generated?
  • Which files are tied to a specific character, material set, or project type?

Support more complex projects without more process overhead

As projects scale, rigid schemas create workarounds. Custom Attributes give teams a way to model more of their real production workflow inside Mudstack, instead of around it.

Looking ahead

We see Custom Attributes as a foundational capability, not just a standalone feature.

One area we are especially excited about is file relationships. Today, teams can use Custom Attributes as a lightweight way to express connections between files. Over time, that can evolve into richer relationship-aware workflows, such as:

  • Identifying which textures or source files belong to a character
  • Tracing upstream and downstream dependencies
  • Understanding impact before making an update
  • Building more explicit file dependency graphs across a project

That becomes especially useful when teams need to update an existing character, revise a material set, or understand what downstream files may be affected by a change.

We also see strong potential for richer structured workflows across both game production and AEC, where teams need to manage more context directly alongside the files they work with.

Tell us how you would use it

Custom Attributes are designed to be flexible because no two pipelines are the same.

We are excited to see how teams use them, whether that means tracking technical specs, workflow status, AI provenance, licensing information, gameplay fields, material data, or file relationships.

We're building Custom Attributes for teams like yours, and your feedback shapes what will come next. Join our Discord to share ideas, report issues, and help us make Mudstack even better.

Try Mudstack for free or get a demo to see Custom Attributes in action. This feature is currently in beta release and will be rolling out to all customers shortly. Check the docs for a full breakdown of what it can do!