Few questions regarding Octane for Blender Tweet

[southbruno]

Hi. I am not sure if this is the right category where to post this. This is the only one I get the authorization to post.
If it is not, I apologize in advance.

I am a Blender user, bit frustrated with cycles. At the moment I am trying Luxcore. I got a bit frustrated after trying several times to achieve renders of my furniture and always needing to do a Phd in math and physics in order to achieve certain materials, therefore I jumped to Lux. The results are quite good, but I must say, It has a really high cost: It is slow. Luxcore is extremely slow when it comes to move in the UI and rotate cameras and visualize previews. I am running a quite powerful laptop, but still Luxcore is really difficult to handle. The outcome is beautiful, but it takes so much of my time to just set a scene and move around objects...

I am Industrial Designer and I follow many people that uses Octane. I would like to ask a few things before buying a membership. I noticed almost all tutorials and courses are made for Cinema. There are a few you tube videos for blender, but still not enough to start from 0. I found really great course when it comes to materials in Octane/Cinema. I am curious to know if those principles are exactly the same as the version for Blender. Are all the materials and features present in the latest blender plugin ? If the answer is yes, then I would not mind to follow Octane tutorials for Cinema. Another great resource is Greyscalegorilla. They have a really nice material pack for C4D Octane. Do you know if I could potentially use those materials? Are the material files the same in all the platforms ?

Last question: Can Octane handle Caustics? I am doing a render that relies a lot on it and that is something not possible to do in Cycles.

In a way I am trying to invest in a render tool that can provide really great visuals (I know Octane can) and at the same time be able to use it in Blender with the performance of cycles in terms of resource consumption.

Kind regards