Nice, I didn't know that. I thought that, like ray tracers, a fancy light node would be cheaper than objects with emissive materials. So the advantage of the light node (besides simplicity/organization) is IES, right? No way to map an IES profile to a blackbody emitter. That AI light will work with ...

Has ORC matured to get more reliable estimates and competitive scene processing?
From what I gathered in this forum I got the impression the situation didn't improve. Capricious estimations and a much overpriced farm service. Is the impression wrong? Is RNDR another thing somewhere or another name ...

Is 4xx being obsoleted in favor of all-access or is Maya 2019 support coming?

I guess I can only hope your are not planning to push denoiser to 4.0.

Where can I find a history of all versions?

I haven't used Octane in a while and I'm having a hard time trying to know what changed going from topic to topic.
There are too many. Almost 1 version per change. The last one for example has just "Octane Daylight value set to default".

How is progress on the denoiser? Any estimates?

I'm aware the estimated cost is not to be expected as it's not accurate. I did a small animation test render and it was off by 578%. It worries me if the price will be this wild on a long animation or even if I could expect a similar ratio.
The test was 49 frames 1280x720 that takes 15 to 17 seconds ...

Is there an estimate to when it'll be available to the regular Joe? Will it work with plugin versions of Octane (Maya)?

What is the plan from now on? Will 3.x Maya plugin definitively continue on the current branch based on 2.x deprecating the node-based design for good, or will the maya-compatible nodes eventually come back in 2017 once it is more robust?

I ask that just to know if it would be worth to write now ...

Will 3.x go forward with this 2.x based branch dropping the node based one?
How can I set it to render to texture?

Just reporting: I'm getting some errors that are messing the Attribute Editor in 2017:
// Error: line 1: Found no attribute match for "perspShape.octSwapEyes" //
// Error: line 1 ...