Excellent material!

Does anyone know of a way to do something similar procedurally, with nodes?

Hi, Paul. Awesome to see you here too, using Octane. I'm hesitant to attempt it on this particular render without 100% confirmation, since it's for production, but good to know it can do that if I need it to in the future. I'm starting an Octane group on DA soon, hope to see you there.

Suppose I want to increase the number of samples I have assigned to a scene during the render, seeing as it will need longer than expected to clean up noise, is it possible to adjust this parameter during the render, or will it restart it from sample 1 again?

Even better than auto-save would be a "resume render", in the same way Luxrender can. So we can save a scene at say 10,000 samples, and render another scene that doesn't require as much time, then go back to that file and pick up where it left off. The ability to stop a render, then resume it where ...