Figured it out. I had the monitor GPU active.

Can anyone explain what is going on with the discrepancy in these two renders? One appears faded, the other is correct. I have reinstalled Octane X PR11 as well as the C4D plugin, to no avail.

Figured it out. + icon - Shelves = check mark Octane and Octane IPR.

I tried following the instructions and Octane appears to somewhat show up but the shelves do not. Can you help? Here is what I have in the houdini.env file:

HOUDINI_PATH = "/Applications/Octane_2019.1.5.0_Houdini_18.0.287_OSX_vr;&"

I am on a MacPro running 10.13.6

I am trying to do this and I can't get it to work in the picture viewer. All I get is a black background. I have tried tif and png sequences.

You can chain as many Mix Textures as you want, using the Group Mask image as the Amount. It works really well. I just did a product shot that uses 2 Mix Textures like this.