Textures don't upload correctly

[dotcom]

Hello guys,

Here is an external linked textures inside a material problem :

The problem i have is when i change a texture in a "master material" (composed of substeps mix mats),
it updates an other material in an other master too / those two "masters" are not linked /

My "masters" Materials are 3 steps Mix materials /
I have 4 masters materials.

My master is composed of a node editor i kept as simple as possible, see the attached image,
so when an image texture is used, it is used once and dispatched in all others materials in this master.



I don't anderstand this, i tried reload and reload again but reloading updates not only the nodes
but some other nodes of other materials that are not in the node.

What is the solution ?

I've tried uncheck the "use texture caching" as i thought this was like a cache problem.
tried to close the doc, quit c4d and then restart but it did not solve either.


Thanks !

[aoktar]

Don't connect one texture to different materials because this limitation. Try to insert refshader for second connections. Or use new Uber material.

[dotcom]

Hello Aoktar,
Thanks for your reply,

For those that might have gone in the same trouble,
here is the refshader in action :

https://vimeo.com/82779935

it's at 00.27 /




The new uber will be reeased in v3.08/

Thanks Aoktar,

++

[aoktar]

Using one texture on different materials by default connection way is not proper to mechanism of C4D. So it's not triggering updates as you can see. And that's one of reasons why i don't love mix-material system in C4D and brings new uber shader system. I have more reasons to build that.
Anyway i'm checking refShader usage and update issue now to put a way to fix/detect update issue for mixmaterials.

[frankmci]

Using one texture on different materials by default connection way is not proper to mechanism of C4D. So it's not triggering updates as you can see. And that's one of reasons why i don't love mix-material system in C4D and brings new uber shader system. I have more reasons to build that.
Anyway i'm checking refShader usage and update issue now to put a way to fix/detect update issue for mixmaterials.

One of our guys was asking me about this today and I don't want to give him bad info. I generally don't use the RefShader, mostly because the Octane Node Editor gets messy enough without what seem to be unnecessary nodes. Yes, I do have to resend the scene to the Live Viewer to update all linked materials properly, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to keep my shader networks a bit more tidy. Other than the Live Viewer update issue, is there any reason not to cross-link different materials via shared nodes?

(edit) Some kind of node grouping system would make things a lot easier, à la Blender, Fusion, etc., both for working within a complex projects, and for re-using existing shaders on future projects. Poking around the forum a bit, it seems the Octane for Blender plugin already supports node grouping. viewtopic.php?f=114&t=57206

Thanks,
- Frank

[aoktar]

One of our guys was asking me about this today and I don't want to give him bad info. I generally don't use the RefShader, mostly because the Octane Node Editor gets messy enough without what seem to be unnecessary nodes. Yes, I do have to resend the scene to the Live Viewer to update all linked materials properly, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to keep my shader networks a bit more tidy. Other than the Live Viewer update issue, is there any reason not to cross-link different materials via shared nodes?

(edit) Some kind of node grouping system would make things a lot easier, à la Blender, Fusion, etc., both for working within a complex projects, and for re-using existing shaders on future projects. Poking around the forum a bit, it seems the Octane for Blender plugin already supports node grouping. viewtopic.php?f=114&t=57206

Thanks,
- Frank

My advice to you is to use New Blend material rather than mix material system with latest 3.08.2-R2.1. It will work well and will give a better workflow.
About grouping, Blender has a native way for that. And I don't use xpresso interface for our Node Editor. So It's a complex feature that's needed to be wrotten scratch. I'm not in this yet.

[frankmci]

[/quote]
My advice to you is to use New Blend material rather than mix material system with latest 3.08.2-R2.1. It will work well and will give a better workflow.
About grouping, Blender has a native way for that. And I don't use xpresso interface for our Node Editor. So It's a complex feature that's needed to be wrotten scratch. I'm not in this yet.[/quote]

Thanks for the quick response, Ahmet, but I meant to ask a more general question about interlinking materials. I'm talking about sharing nodes between materials in general, for instance, when using a single Noise node driving the bump on three different materials. If I hook the noise directly to the three materials, only the first material will update in the Live Viewer as I change the noise settings, unless I use the RefShader node as an intermediary. I generally don't bother with the RefMaterial, and live with the fact that I have to force a refresh to see the updates for all linked materials.

As far a I can tell, this hasn't caused any problems, but I don't know what's going on under the hood as the plugin translates the Octane node based system into the C4D layer based system. Is there a good reason to use the RefMaterial for linked materials other than live viewer refresh?

[aoktar]

That's why I created new blend material. When you use one texture in different materials, only one material has ownership of this texture. And just one material’s update will be detected. It's about design of C4D system.

[frankmci]

That's why I created new blend material. When you use one texture in different materials, only one material has ownership of this texture. And just one material’s update will be detected. It's about design of C4D system.

Pardon me if I'm being dense, but there's something I'm missing here. I thought the Blend Material was essentially a more powerful version of the Mix Material, letting us build more complex stacks without having to build long daisy-chains of Mix Material nodes. (I do love the new Blend Material for that, and I think it's a big improvement!) However, I'm not talking about layering and blending multiple materials, just driving attributes across multiple materials without having to create lots of duplicate nodes and transfer attributes manually or via expresso.

I understand that technically only one material has ownership, but the fact is that cross linking to multiple materials seems to work fine, except for realtime updates in the LV.

Could you share an example of how you would use the new Blend Material to drive , for instance, the Opacity of multiple materials, all from the same source Image Texture node? I suspect the answer is right in front of my nose, and I'm not seeing it. Or I may be completely misunderstanding, and you are saying, "No, just don't do it. You'll break things."

Thanks!

[aoktar]

I understand that technically only one material has ownership, but the fact is that cross linking to multiple materials seems to work fine, except for realtime updates in the LV.

Yes, it will work fine when you start a render, because every material will be converted once time on start. After that for RT updates, plugin needs to catch a message from updated material for changing the parameters. So it just detect one updated material, not for second one. Second one stays at first state until a message has been triggered somehow.

Could you share an example of how you would use the new Blend Material to drive , for instance, the Opacity of multiple materials, all from the same source Image Texture node? I suspect the answer is right in front of my nose, and I'm not seeing it. Or I may be completely misunderstanding, and you are saying, "No, just don't do it. You'll break things."

Thanks!

See image