DinoMFX informed it it's a current limitation. Here's a workaround he sent me:

"you can just create another Output AOV with a Render AOV layer set to Beauty as a pass and that one will have alpha, also all other passes except the default beauty will have alpha"

I just updated to octane 2025.2 with the hot fix and my scene that was rendering correctly in octane 2023, is not rendering with an alpha channel, even though nothing changed and the alpha is being shown in the live viewer. any thoughts on fixing this?

One thing to try is to render the orbx file in the standalone and see if it looks the same. I'm curious to see why there's a difference as I can see using both the render network and local rendering for projects as well.

I've noticed some pretty large differences between octane 2023 and 2024 in ...

Thank you for confirming and offering solution! Thais now worked as expected. I'll keep an eye out for the bug fix.

After updating to Octane 2024.1.2 I'm unable to render an alpha channel to PSD renders. I must be missing something extremely basic, but I get a black background in my PSD. The live viewer shots a checkard board pattern, and from what I can tell my settings are right. I even tried placing an octane ...

I just updated to 2024.1.2 and the Queue is working again.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try that next.

Thank you for testing Beppe,

I'm thinking something might be corrupt in my plugin install. I'll try reinstalling and see if the problem persists. No matter where I have the Render AOV group set to it will not render a file.

I'm unable to get the Render Queue to use the "Render AOV group" output from the Render settings. C4d will only use what's in the C4d "save" tab, even though it's unchecked. Is there a workaround, or is this addressed in a newer version? Any help would be appreciated.

i'm using a 10gig network. Network rendering scales quite well when longer render times are needed. But for shorter renders, there's a lot of node downtime when updated frames and saving the file. It's just hard to justify an extra $230 a year per node. I have 11 nodes.