@ tungerz: well done! nice to see you can get something out of it
@ steveps3: the new exporter allows to control all materials of the internal graph from blender (limited to basic drivers such as floattexture/floatimage/image/alphaimage, but for all channels - diffuse/specular/roughness/bump/normal/opacity/emitter). There's little benefit for static images as you should tweak materials inside Octane, not Blender. On the other side, with it you can animate anything from blender, including material type and all parameters from Mesh Preview Environment and Mesh Preview Kernel. It still allow to work the 'old' way, may be just with less accuracy when exporting through MTL (no specular for instance). But once again, this doesn't really matter for static images.