We study a recently introduced base $b$ polynomial analog of Stern's diatomic sequence, which generalizes Stern polynomials of Klavar, Dilcher, Ericksen, Mansour, Stolarsky, and others. We lift some basic properties of base $2$ Stern polynomials to arbitrary base, and introduce a matrix characterization of Stern polynomials. By specializing, we recover some new number theoretic results about hyper $b$-ary partitions, which count partitions of $n$ into powers of $b$.