I think we talk past each other. You don’t want to use the material time node, you want to make it a parameter and change it and you update this parameter in your Blueprint or UI by getting the time there and passing this value to the material. Because that’s what RyanB said here:
If you want to fade with timing on spawn, you need to create a material instance dynamic. Once you have an MID created by the blueprint you can use one of two ways to control the fade. One is via timelines where you manually control a scalarparameter and set the “time” as the value output from the timeline. In this case, the output pin of the timeline DOES tick and update the MID. There is some cost however small to this method.
The second method is to simply create a scalarparameter called “spawntime” and on spawn, create an MID and set the scalarparameter to the value of real time.
If I misunderstood you, I’m sorry <3