Mix Shader Not Updating Unless Reconnect Each Time

[botoy234]

I am having an issue where my mix material only displays correctly if I disconnect and reconnect the nodes, so it doesn’t update when I render the final straight to the picture viewer. I’ve looked all over the forums and some posts say to use an octane object tab and to check "force update", but I have tried that, it doesn’t fix the problem. So I can only get it to work in live viewer by disconnecting and reconnecting the nodes, but not in Picture Viewer.

Strange notes that may help diagnose:
If I open an a new file and make a new mix shader from scratch, it doesn't need to be disconnected and reconnected to work. So I initially thought it might be a problem with the old shader itself. And yet, when I use the old shader in a new file, it also works fine. So then I thought the problem might be geo. And then if I copy the geometry to a new file and use it with the copied shader that works too, and all without octane object tags, either.

So the only thing I can conclude is it must be some general C4D setting I've changed by accident. I can work around by setting up a new file this time, but in some situations that could be bad.

3090, Ryzen 9 5900x, 64 GB

[aoktar]

Having shared nodes between materials extremely problematic for mix materials. Also mix materials are not working well for updates because of this. Updates are valid if you just use a texture which is owned by a material, it will not update other material. This is C4D based issue because C4D's material system is not designed to own a node which is owned by other material.