Thank you, Sikotik13. You nailed it. I've somehow made a change so that character textures are now loaded a MIX materials instead of DIFFUSE. Very frustrating. Now I just have to figure out how to fix that.

How do I reset the DS Add-On (or Standalone) to the defaults I started with? I've somehow managed to screw up the daylight environment and now Aiko 6 is all washed out. I tried uninstalling both the stand alone and the add-on, but they still appeared when I started DS, so I'm sure the settings ...

Confession time. Because my system is less than a year old, it never dawned on me that my frustrations with the new plugin version was something other than teething problems from Octane. I just updated my nVidia drivers. <POOF> Problem gone that quick. Render times are smokin' fast.

Sorry for ...

Eureka!

Most of my troubles went away when I unchecked 'Automatic materials updates after content loads'. If I just set up a scene and then create missing materials it works fine. And yes t_3, there is a noticeable improvement in render times.

It certainly doesn't like loading previous scene ...

>> @rbennet, @Elele: this should be not the case; from octane 1.13 > 1.20 render speed was increased by about 10-15% - what cards >> do you use? how did you compare?

I'm running dual 2GB nVidia GeForce GTX 680s on a system based around the Intel i7 at 4.2GHz with dual monitors. DS performs normally ...

I love the changes, but my computer doesn't. Render times have tripled. How do I go back to the old plug-in until some of you smarter people get the bugs worked out?

Several of my V4-based characters suffer "cracked faces" in Octane. See attached render. Does anyone know a solution to this? Thanks.

Thanks for the quick response. That clears it up nicely.

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but I'm a bit stumped. I'm running dual 2G GeForce GTX 680 cards. The Octane DS plugin recognizes that both are there. However, under Usage Statistics it only shows 2048M of VRAM memory available. I'm already running into issues where I run out of usable ...