That's just stupid!
without a decent export option, World creator for octane is a gimmick at best.

First of, COMPOSITION. Composition is everything, you can have great lighting and materials but your picture will look boring and uninteresting.
currently you have the swiss knife and keys in the foreground, with high contrast in both color and light. so your eye want to look there. But it's out of ...

A promotional video I created for Jordan and Wilfa last year.
Using Octane with Maya and realflow.
Octane is great for this when working alone without a renderfarm backing you up during rendertimes :)
Rendertime is about 2 minutes per frame, most of that time went to actually loading meshes to the ...

Here are my general thoughts.
Didn't comment on the missing textures and stuff that i believe you are aware of already.
Composition overall:
I think you need to draw the eye towards the kitchen/dining area, since thats the main subject.

I usually just set the map temporary in the diffuse.
for an exampel.
If i need to adjust a normalmap, I hook it upp to the diffuse channel, adjust it. Then hook it back into the normalmap channel.
Don't know if there is a better way to do this but since I don't do it that often it works fine.

Aha!
Thanks.

Hi,
Anybody else experience this?
there is some kind of default light on in the environment.
it goes away if i turn down exposure in the camera, but then I have to turn up the lights to ridiculous amounts.
Anybody know what is causing this?

heres a pic, as you can se no lights in scene but there is ...

subdivide the mesh 1-2 times and render it with a hdri map of some sort, and you will see a great difference, right now it's missing proper reflections.

Its a tad bit dark. As if the sun has already set. I would take back the sun a bit and increase the light try to get that golden sunset to make it a bit more interesting.
Also take a look at speedtree its great for making quick trees. And then you dont need to make those intersecting planes.

I ...

Hi.
This is from one of my latest personal projects.
Two renders of the Koeningsegg CCX.

enjoy!