The Universal Material has a strange behavior at low specular roughness values. It has these harmonic ring looking artifacts. These artifacts fade away as roughness approaches 0.002 and up.

I tested the same on the metallic material and no such artifacts exist.
Ray Epsilon has no affect.
The rings ...

The Universal Material has a strange behavior at low specular roughness values. It has these harmonic ring looking artifacts. These artifacts fade away as roughness approaches 0.002 and up.
https://imgur.com/esQ8c8Q.jpg

I tested the same on the metallic material and no such artifacts exist.
Ray ...

It works!! Thank you for such a hasty fix.

+1!

Sorry for the delay. Interesting that you've heard about this with other software too.

Here's my .env after the beginning comments:
HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR = 2

TOOLS = /tools/houdini
OCTANE = $TOOLS/octane
MOPS = $TOOLS/MOPS
SHNOPS = $TOOLS/SHNOPs


HOUDINI_OTLSCAN_PATH = $MOPS/otls;$SHNOPS/otls;@/otls ...

At any point after the file has had a material-based OTL enter the mat network, trying to create a node inside results in a hang and then immediate crash, without fail.

Things I have tried, and their results after trying to create a node inside the "Octane Material Builder":
• Creating an OTL out ...

@acc24ex

I also ran into that problem with opening other projects. It's annoying but luckily fairly easy to work around. Hopefully it will be a quick fix after the new kernel is implemented.

kcpr-raffaEl are you familiar with the animation export that the 3DS Max plugin provides? I recently tried it and it worked perfectly for my animation.

Octane 3.06 has Adaptive Sampling which will be a solution to your problem. They're currently working on implementing the changes into the 3DS max plugin, but there is no solidified release date. It may be a couple of weeks.

While the sides will help, this is not "custom" bokeh, it is just polygonal. True custom bokeh will be image files. Also, the effect jim99 is after is more of an edge effect than a shape. While this is currently possible with "Aperture Edge" in the camera settings, its effect is fairly limited ...