BCON23: Custom Data in glTF files

Generally speaking, there are three types of glTF files:

GLTF_EMBEDDED

All scene, model and texture data is encoded in a single JSON file. Binary data is stored as base64 encoded strings.

GLTF_SEPARABLE

The structure of the scenes and data is stored in the JSON file. Any associated binary data is stored in separate files:

• .png, .jpeg, .webp for images, and,
• .bin for general binary data, such as vertex positions, etc.

GLTF_BINARY

All data baked into a single binary format, which is most easily thought of as a binary equivalent to JSON.

These days though, it seems like in Blender 4.0 the support for creating new GLTF_EMBEDDED, has been removed.

As we take a peek inside the glTF file, we can use the following diagram to get an almost complete overview of the format, or at least, all entities that exist in the glTF world and how they are related to each other:

There are a few high-level things to note here: The topmost part of the file describe the scene graph(s) and models, whereas the lower parts more closely define the data-storage models.

As most of this work is more closely related to the data-model, I will skip the details about the scene-graph and shading aspects. If you are interested in those aspects, I would suggest checking out Julien Duroure excellent BCON23 presentation instead.

Handling custom data inside the format typically boils down into packing your existing data into something that glTF can understand. And, beyond using JSON primitives, the following basic building blocks can be used:

Buffers

The Buffer is the lowest level of data storage: An unstructured array of bytes.

BufferViews

A container of metadata on how to index a Buffer with an offset, stride and length.

Accessors

Descriptor over the amount, and type of data, (uint32, float, vec3, etc.) that a BufferView points to.

Textures

Descriptor with pointers on how to find Images and Samplers.

Images

A descriptor of a JPEG, PNG or WEBP image metadata, with pointers to find the image either directly in the glTF file as a BufferView, or with a URI link to it.

Sampler

Describes how an image is intended to be sampled, i.e., how texels are wrapped and filtered.

On the Blender side of things, these objects are eventually translated to a set of Python classes by the glTF importer and exporter addon. Each object that exist in glTF has a corresponding class associated with it, and any entity that was cross-referenced in JSON with integer indices gets resolved into a proper object-reference, all to make it a lot easier to handle the data. Thus, the following entity-to-class translation occurs:

• Buffer, BufferView ⇒ BinaryData
• Accessor ⇒ Accessor
• Texture ⇒ Texture
• Image ⇒ ImageData
• Sampelr ⇒ Sampler

If you are working with glTF in any capacity, I strongly suggest you keep the specification around as you will probably be looking up exactly what any of the objects contain or point to a number of times. This is useful to understand both the file format and classes on the Blender side as the above classes act as both a data-container and a wrapper for reading and writing to the various types of glTF files.

Most import for us though, is the Extension mechanism. As noted above, the glTF-file is really just a kind of JSON file. As such, we can technically add whatever data we want to it. Obviously, some aspects are mandatory in order to be compliant with glTF, but the specification also gives us an official way for adding new attributes in a structured fashion.

import io_scene_gltf2.io.exp.gltf2_io_binary_data as exp
import io_scene_gltf2.io.imp.gltf2_io_binary_data as imp
indices = [0, 1, 2]
binary_data = exp.BinaryData(bytes(indices))
decoded = imp.BinaryData.decode_accessor_internal(binary_data)

This is done by adding new key-object pairs under a special extension-object. The key in this case is the vendor prefix: Typically the letters KHR, for Khronos in this case, or similar for other commercial entities, followed by a descriptive title. In this case, lights_punctual which allows us to embed various point-like light-source in the scene. For this talk though, everything is obviously assumed to be custom, so where applicable I will just use the prefix NONE.

These extensions essentially come in two flavors: required and optional. As the names suggest, if an extension is required, a compliant glTF-parser or renderer should abort if it does not support the extension. E.g., meshes that are compressed with an unsupported algorithm, could fall under this category.

Optional ones though could be things such as metadata containers, or optional rendering features. I.e., if the client does not support it, it should still be able to use all other data, although renderings may be different from what the author intended.

{
  "extensionsUsed":[
    "KHR_lights_punctual",
    "KHR_materials_transmission"
  ],
  "extensionsRequired":[
    "KHR_lights_punctual"
  ],
  "extensions":{
    "KHR_lights_punctual":{
      "lights":[]
    }
  }
}

Extensions that are used by the glTF file are listed in the top of the JSON structure, as in the above example.

"nodes": [
    {
        "extensions":{
            "KHR_lights_punctual":{
                "light":0
            }
        },
        "name":"Point",
        "rotation":[],
        "translation":[]
    },
]

Depending on the extension itself, more extension-keys can be found elsewhere in the file. E.g., the above extension can define point-lights attached to the scene-graph. Where and how these keys are found is entirely up to the extension itself however. Sometimes though, extensions end up being useful for many people out there, as such they may become standardized, and a collection of these can be found here:

• https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/tree/main/extensions

Creating official extensions in this way is well beyond the scope of this write-up however, but this link should be enough for the interested parties out there.

Note that in Blender 4.2 the addon management has changed pretty significantly, as is detailed here. For now, they can still be installed on a per-file basis as described in this post, but it is likely that this will be deprecated and removed at some point in the future.

Blender has also provided a page about creating extensions here. I may eventually update this page based on this, or even create my own extension repository with some of this work, but this will have to wait for now.

Let us start with a clear goal in mind for this plugin: We want to be able to choose an image to use as a watermark on all images exported by the glTF addon. To that end, we want to add a panel to the glTF exporter that looks something like this:

Basically, we want the ability to enable or disable the watermark-plugin and be able to select what image to use as a watermark. I am sure there are a lot of other potential options that could be added here, such as watermark location, size, etc. but for now, let us keep things simple.

Starting from the top: The first thing we need is a special variable called bl_info that Blender uses to pick up metadata about the plugin, such as the name, description, current version, which Blender versions it supports, and so on. You can see an example of this below:

bl_info = {
    "name": "glTF Export Watermarker Extension",
    "category": "Import-Export",
    "version": (1, 0, 0),
    "blender": (3, 0, 0),
    "location": "File > Export > glTF 2.0",
    "description": "Watermark any exported image texture.",
    "author": "Gustaf Waldemarson",
}

This is not unique to our plugin though, but is something used by all Blender addons. And after a bit of digging, I even found a link to the specification for this variable, so here you can see all options that you can (and should) add to it.

Next, we need to create a so-called property class that we can use to contains the control options, in short, we want something like this:

class WatermarkingExtensionProperties(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):

    enabled: bpy.props.BoolProperty(
        name="glTF Export Watermarker Extension",
    )
    watermark: bpy.props.StringProperty(
        name="Watermark image",
    )

Essentially, we want a boolean property to determine if we should enable or disable the plugin, and a string to identify the image we want to use as a watermark.

Furthermore, these properties will help us to create appropriate buttons to change these options, but to create those, we need to create a panel:

class GLTF_PT_UserExtensionWatermarkingPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_space_type = 'FILE_BROWSER'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOL_PROPS'
    bl_label = 'Enabled'
    bl_parent_id = 'GLTF_PT_export_user_extensions'
    bl_options = {'DEFAULT_CLOSED'}

    def draw_header(self, context):
        props = bpy.context.scene.WatermarkingExtensionProperties
        self.layout.prop(props, 'enabled')

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        layout.use_property_split = True
        layout.use_property_decorate = False
        props = bpy.context.scene.WatermarkingExtensionProperties
        layout.active = props.enabled
        box = layout.box()
        box.label(text="NONE_watermark")
        layout.prop(props, "watermark", text="Watermark Image")

This class effectively determines the look-and-feel of the controls for the options. It also contains a slew of variables and methods to define how to create the buttons that set the properties, where they should be created, and so forth. Of particular interest in this case is the bl_parent_id variable. When it is set to the special string, GLTF_PT_export_user_extension, it signals that we are a child of the main glTF export panel. Obviously, we could change this and place these options elsewhere, but this is a logical place for it: Right next to the other glTF export options.

Next, we need to actually register these classes with Blender and store them somewhere in the scene context such that we can actually modify or retrieve them at a later time.

Here though, we may actually run into a minor problem: Our plugin implicitly depends on the main glTF addon, hence, if that addon is not actually loaded yet, and we will fail to register the panel. Thus, while crude, the simplest way to handle this is simply to use try-except guards:

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(WatermarkingExtensionProperties)
    prop = bpy.props.PointerProperty(type=WatermarkingExtensionProperties)
    bpy.types.Scene.WatermarkingExtensionProperties = prop

def register_panel():
    try:
        bpy.utils.register_class(GLTF_PT_UserExtensionWatermarkingPanel)
    except Exception:
        pass
    return unregister_panel

Further, if we can register the classes, we should also have the ability un-register them, should we want uninstall the plugin. This is done with a corresponding functions:

def unregister_panel():
    try:
        bpy.utils.unregister_class(GLTF_PT_UserExtensionWatermarkingPanel)
    except Exception:
        pass

def unregister():
    unregister_panel()
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(WatermarkingExtensionProperties)
    del bpy.types.Scene.WatermarkingExtensionProperties

Now we finally get to the class that defines these glTF plugins. In your script, you should define a class with the exact name glTF2ExportUserExtension and add methods to it that corresponds to what we want to customize. In our case, we want to customize all images, something that is done by using the appropriately named gather_image_hook, where we simply receive the glTF image, and the Blender equivalent. With those, we are free to modify each of these as we see fit, such as in our case: Adding a watermark based on our input properties.

To avoid the dependency problem I mentioned earlier, it is best to avoid import calls to dependent modules until we know that they are present, hence these import statements that are found in somewhat funky locations.

class glTF2ExportUserExtension:
  def __init__(self):
    from io_scene_gltf2.io.com.gltf2_io_extensions import Extension
    self.props = bpy.context.scene.WatermarkingExtensionProperties

  def gather_image_hook(self,
                        gltf2_image,
                        blender_shader_sockets,
                        export_settings):
    watermark(gltf2_image)

This is essentially the minimum that a glTF plugin needs to contain. However, as we will get into in a bit, there are a few additions that I recommend that you add to make the code more robust, especially if you are targeting multiple Blender versions.

I should also mentioned that in addition to the above class, you can also create a list or tuple variable called glTF2ExportUserExtensions (notice the s). That list should then contain all classes that have customization methods that you want to use for you plugin.

The function that then performs the actual watermarking looks something like this:

def watermark(self, gltf_image):
    img = img2numpy(gltf_image)
    img = watermark_internal(img, mark)
    data = img2memory(gltf_image.mime_type, img)
    mime = gltf_image.mime_type
    if gltf_image.uri:
        import io_scene_gltf2.io.exp.gltf2_io_image_data as gltf
        name = gltf_image.uri.name
        gltf_image.uri = gltf.ImageData(data, mime, name)
    else:
        import io_scene_gltf2.io.exp.gltf2_io_binary_data as gltf
        gltf_image.buffer_view = gltf.BinaryData(data)

In short, it does this:

1. First, convert the encoded glTF image to something we can use, such as a numpy array in this case.
2. Then, we read the cached watermark image and apply it.
3. And finally, we convert the image back to a binary format again.

We do have to be slightly careful though: It is the user that decides what format the image is stored in depending on the GLTF_EMBEDDED or GLTF_SEPARABLE option. Hence, a good plugin should respect that choice, even if we could override it here. Thankfully, this is pretty easy to handle: We simply check the uri attribute of the original image, and then use either the BinaryData for embedded formats, or the ImageData class for the separable ones.

Lastly, I want to say a few words about the so-called Extension class provided by the glTF addon, which I did not actually have to use in this example. This is a special class used to signal that we are adding extension data of some kind so that the exporter can add it to the list of used Extensions. As I showed before though, we can place this class pretty much anywhere, such as in the node hierarchy in this example:

def gather_node_hook(self, gltf_obj, bl_object, export_settings):
    key = extension_name
    if self.properties.enabled:
        if gltf_obj.extensions is None:
            gltf_obj.extensions = {}
        gltf_obj.extensions[key] = self.Extension(
            name=key,
            extension={"float": self.properties.float_property},
            required=False,
        )

It can also contain anything that is representable as JSON data, and this includes any of the other glTF classes, even the special BinaryData and ImageData classes I showed earlier, and in those cases, the data is packed into buffers or exported as files and the references are replaced with buffer views or URIs.

As I said before, I think that this is a good example to show-case what can be done with these kinds of plugins. As such, I am striving to make this available in its entirety in the not to distant future, but I still need a go-ahead from Arm before that can happen.

So, in my case I wanted to create a plugin that can generate these micromaps and embed them as a part of the glTF-file, but we also want them to be realistic, that is, we want our exporter to find any alpha-texture associated with each triangle and generate a representative opacity micromap for it. In brief, we want to do the following:

for triangle in scene:
    if tri.alpha_map:
        generate_micromaps(tri.alpha_map)

And just so we are all clear on exactly what we want in the end: We want to be able to generate glTF-files that contains extension objects that look something like this:

"meshes":[
{
  "name":"Plane.001",
  "primitives":[
    {
      "extensions":{
        "NONE_opacity_micromap":{
          "level":2,
          "mode":"4state",
          "micromaps":[
            "0b00101010000000001010101010101000",
            "0b00000000100010101010100000100000"
          ]
        }

That is, each primitive (i.e., list of triangles) should now have a list of micromaps associated with it, with any interesting metadata, such as the subdivision level included in it.

On the face of it, we should be able to add a customization method for primitives and process each of them during the export process. Unfortunately, glTF structures primitives as you can see below, and of particular note is that materials, and consequently, the alpha-textures, are attached to the mesh rather than the primitive. So we actually need to move up a bit and customize the mesh-exporter instead.

Additionally, the micromaps needs to be matched with the correct vertex indices. Which may be a bit troublesome, as the Blender indices does not necessarily match the one used by glTF, at least not at the time of writing this.

Further, another good reason for moving up to the mesh level is that we can more easily attach some control attributes on each object that we can use to control the micromap generation process on a per-mesh-basis, which you can also learn more about in the extras section at the end.

Thus, to adapt our loop to the glTF world, we will do the following: Each time we export a mesh, check if the triangle contains alpha-textures, and if so:

1. Extract the glTF triangles (indices, UVs, materials and textures).
2. Use these to map all triangles to the alpha texture(s).
3. Generate the opacity micromaps from that mapping.
4. Store them in the .gltf-file.

In pseudo-code, this roughly become:

for mesh in gltf_scene:
    for primitive in mesh:
        alpha_map = mesh.material.baseColorTexture
        if alpha_map:
            indices = gltf_access(primitive.indices)
            tex_coords = gltf_access(primitive.tex_coords)
            primitive.extension = micromaps_extension(...)

This is easily implemented in the glTF-hook gather_mesh_hook(), as you can see below. Although, there are a number of caveats that make this a bit more challenging in practice: Each time a micromap is divided, it quadruples the number of sub-triangles that needs to be processed. In total then, there are \(4^n\cdot\#\text{primitives}\) subtriangles to handle, but thankfully, each of them are also computationally independent.

def gather_mesh_hook(gltf_mesh, bl_mesh, ...):
    for primitive in gltf_mesh:
        alpha_map = gltf_mesh.material.baseColorTexture
        if alpha_map:
            indices = gltf_access(primitive.indices)
            tex_coords = gltf_access(primitive.tex_coords)
            primitive.extension = micromaps_extension(...)

Clearly, we want to parallelize this as much as possible, which in the case of Python, means bringing in the multiprocessing module, and probably also some way of profiling the code to find any problematic parts but those details are left for the extra section.

Lastly, I want to briefly mention something about importers. Mostly, I have been focused on exporters, which makes sense: It is what I have primarily worked with. However, it is also the most common use for glTF; typically you have a detailed model with a lot of data (in Blender or some other framework) that is effectively filtered as you export it.

There are of course exceptions, and the most compelling use case is probably compression. Say that we have developed a new compression algorithm, then we might want to use an importer plugin to test the decoding process.

Structure-wise, importers are very similar to exporters: The main thing that can differ is that we sometimes have both a before and an after hook, which makes sense: We cannot work on compressed data without actually decoding it first.

Developing a complete decoding/encoding pair is obviously far outside the scope of this work, so we will settle for a much simpler example:

class glTF2ImportUserExtension:

    def __init__(self):
        from io_scene_gltf2.io.com.gltf2_io_extensions import Extension
        self.properties = bpy.context.scene.OmmImporterExtensionProperties
        self.extensions = [Extension(name="NONE_opacity_micromap",
                                     extension={},
                                     required=False)]

    def gather_import_mesh_after_hook(self, gltf2_mesh, blender_mesh, gltf):
        if self.properties.enabled:
            create_micromap_attributes(gltf2_mesh, blender_mesh)

This simple importer looks for the presence of micromaps in the input glTF-mesh, and if found, adds appropriate attributes such that they will be re-generated during the next export:

mode, level, quality = find_attributes(gltf_mesh)
if level:
    bl_mesh["micromapLevel"] = level
if mode:
    bl_mesh["micromapMode"] = mode
if quality:
    bl_mesh["micromapQuality"] = quality

And of course, setting attributes such as these is easy: We simply need to find some attributes such as the mode, level and quality in this example, by scanning the glTF mesh for these extension keys. Then we set these attributes on the Blender mesh object. Once imported, you can find them under the custom properties:

This is arguably of limited use, but a tool like that could be useful if you are importing old models or are compositing several models together, to name just two use cases.

One of the more useful things (at least for me) that I really did not have time to dig into during my presentation was how to run these and other Blender plugins from the command-line. This may seem a bit esoteric, but trust me: Once you have opened the export-menu a few times in a row to test something, you really start wishing for a simpler way.

Besides, the glTF export process can actually take a really long time in some cases, so this trick can also be used to start up multiple new Blender instances to handle the exports.

To do this, you essentially have two options:

1. Using a Bash scripts that runs Blender with --background and --python-console or --python-text, or
2. A Python script with --background and --python.

For the first one, you could write a script such as:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
# Use Blender to load 3D scene and test to re-export it as glTF.

input=${1:?"No input .obj file given"}
output=${2:?"No output directory given"}
base_ext=$(basename ${input})
base=${base_ext%.*}
mkdir -p ${output}
blender --background --python-console <<EOF

import bpy

for c in bpy.context.scene.collection.children:
    bpy.context.scene.collection.children.unlink(c)

bpy.ops.wm.obj_import(filepath='${input}')

bpy.ops.export_scene.gltf(filepath='${output}/${base}.gltf',
                          export_cameras=True,
                          export_lights=True,
                          export_format='GLTF_SEPARATE')
EOF

For the second one, you could write the same script as:

blender --background --python script.py -- scene.obj scene-dir

Where script.py contains the following:

import sys
import bpy
import os
import os.path
argv = sys.argv[sys.argv.index("--") + 1:]
if len(argv) == 0:
    print("No input .obj file given")
    exit(1)
if len(argv) == 1:
    print("No output directory given")
    exit(2)

for c in bpy.context.scene.collection.children:
    bpy.context.scene.collection.children.unlink(c)

infile = argv[0]
output = argv[1]
base, _ = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(infile))
os.makedirs(output, exist_ok=True)

bpy.ops.wm.obj_import(filepath=infile)

bpy.ops.export_scene.gltf(filepath=os.path.join(output, base),
                          export_cameras=True,
                          export_lights=True,
                          export_format='GLTF_SEPARATE')

Which of these to use really depends on your preferences. Personally, I tend to prefer Bash when possible since it is often possible to write them really succinctly. But for longer things with more complex logic I usually end up with a Python script instead.

Unfortunately, it is not always straight-forward to install modules the traditional way with pip, since Blender uses its own instance of Python that is not necessarily connected to the one used by the system. In my case, the scripts I developed to handle the micromap-generation only used a few extra dependencies, most notably matplotlib, which I needed to get access to somehow. What I ended up with, is the following bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Install blender Addon and required utilities (Blender 3.4-4.0).

script_dir=$( cd -- "$( dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" &> /dev/null && pwd )
blender=${1:-blender}

# Find the Blender python binary and addons directory paths.
empty=$(${blender} --background --python-expr "print()")
python=$(${blender} --background --python-expr "import sys; print(sys.executable)")
addons=$(${blender} --background --python-expr "import bpy; print(bpy.utils.user_resource('SCRIPTS', path='addons'))")

# Strip additional junk from the Blender output.
python="${python::-${#empty}}"
addons="${addons::-${#empty}}"

${python} -m pip install --target="${addons}/modules" --upgrade matplotlib

printf "Addon installed in: ${addons}\n"
exit 0

In short, it figures out the Blender versions and paths to the internal Python interpreter and uses those to install the necessary dependencies.

This worked for me. However, Python dependencies are currently a rather serious problem for all Blender plugin developers:

If two different plugins uses the same dependency, but different versions of it, one of them is going to have a terrible time. During the conference I saw some suggestions of bundling all dependencies with the plugin and manipulating the module search paths to ensure that only the "right" modules were being used.

This felt extremely hacky, but I also do not really know a better way to solve this. I do hope though that the primary Blender developers will develop some official way to list dependencies with the addon to avoid these issues.

Perhaps we should add a bl_requirements variable that should contain the content of pip freeze? I.e., the third-party dependencies?

  bl_requirements="""
lxml==4.9.3
matplotlib==3.7.1
numpy==1.24.2
  """

Then it would be up to Blender to install those during register / unregister or during addon installation. I am not a Blender developer though, So I do not know how feasible this would be in practice.

Another area that I only briefly mentioned in my original presentation is the matter of profiling the plugins, so let us dig a bit deeper here: In general Python code, the easiest way to profile a script is simply to run it through the cProfile or profile module, e.g.:

python -m cProfile test.py <remaining arguments...>
# or
python -m profile test.py <remaining arguments...>

The glTF exporter plugins runs inside Blender however, something that makes the situation a bit trickier. Naturally, we could profile all of Blender, but that would add a lot of noise that we would have to filter out. Thankfully, both of these standard Python modules provide some additional tooling to improve upon things. And we only really need two things:

• A method to start counting our function calls,
• A method to stop counting our function calls.

These can then be inserted in our code, roughly like this:

def gltf_export_mesh():
    profiler.enable()
    # ...
    profiler.disable()

def glTF2_post_export_callback(export_settings):
    for obj in export_settings['gltf_user_extensions']:
        if isinstance(obj, glTF2ExportUserExtension):
            obj.print_profiling_stats()

And if we do not want to profile all the time, we could just add appropriate attributes to enable those calls conditionally. In my case, I ended up with a dummy-profiling class like this:

class DummyProfiler:
    def enable(self):
        """Simulate enabling the profiler."""
    def disable(self):
        """Simulate disabling the profiler."""
    def __bool__(self):
        """We are not profiling."""
        return False

Another option would be to create a context-manager to handle this, but that is mostly a matter of preference.

Another thing to mention is the matter of debugging the plugins. A bit embarrassingly, I often prefer use print-statements to figure out what is going on. Obviously though, sometimes there is too much state to print out at once, and you really need to get a prompt in there. To that end, the best thing to do is what the Blender documentation recommends: Add this (slightly cryptic) one-liner at the place where you want your prompt to start:

__import__('code').interact(local=dict(globals(), **locals()))

Note though that this is only a normal Python prompt. Typically, it's better to have a proper debug prompt, which you can get with this line instead:

import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

That same Blender page also has plenty of more tips and tricks that may be useful for you, so do check it out!

Beyond the mechanism mention here, there are at least two more ways to add custom data to your glTF models:

1. One is by using the so-called "extras" attribute attached to the glTF node- or mesh-object.
2. The other is by using custom vertex attributes.

For small chunks of data, the extras attribute is often sufficient. E.g., if you add some flags to your object. This attribute is easily added from Blender by setting the export option "Custom Properties" in the glTF export menu. Then, any values listed among the Custom properties on the Blender side of things will become available in the node.extras for objects and mesh.extras for vertices respectively, as seen below:

Further, for data that should be applied to every vertex, edge, face, or face-corner of a mesh, using either color attributes or custom vertex attributes is a possibility. For vertices and corners where the data can be represented as a float or byte color format, using a color attribute is recommended, as that is directly supported by Blender, and it is possible to use the built-in vertex-painting tool to directly set the data.

For all other options, it is currently a bit harder to set the data appropriately. Effectively, you have three options:

1. Set the data manually, by selecting your vertex, edge, face or corner and clicking Mesh > Set Attribute and setting the attribute.
2. Using a custom addon as described here.
3. Using Geometry Nodes to redirect the vertex painting process to your custom attributes.

Neither of these approaches are ideal for quickly setting values to many primitives at once, but I am hopeful that this will be improved in the future.

One caveat though: In order for the glTF exporter to actually pick up the custom attribute, the name must start with an underscore (_) and the option Data > Mesh > Attributes must be enabled in the glTF export menu. Vertex color attributes, in contrast gets enabled by the option Data > Mesh > Vertex Color, and are typically set to the glTF-attribute "COLOR_0", however I would recommend to only use a single vertex color attribute for now, as there seem to be some complications with using multiple "COLOR_" attributes at the moment. If I am reading this right, you need to make sure that the shader graph actually uses any secondary colors for them to be exported.