I can believe the internals are somewhat closed. However, it seems to me if Octane is indeed a 'physically based' renderer then it should be straight forward to get some info on how you're supposed to mimic real world properties, using typical real-world parameters.
I would also be interested in ...

Thanks so much for that quick reply. Sounds encouraging! As long as the number of different materials I want to use remains relatively small (as I will have to edit each scene manually for those) then it seems like it will work for me.

Also thanks for your comments on how you set up your network ...

Hi,
I noticed the post regarding command line options for running the standalone renderer. In our work we specifically need to render out hundreds of images of relatively simple scenes (single simple mesh, HDR environment light) where the simple mesh changes from image to image as well as having one ...