I don't know whether this is a bug or the expected behavior.
The test scene (attached) positions the camera at -35,0,0 in XYZ space and is rotated 90 degrees to point at the direction of travel of a glowing blue ball 5 meters in diameter that is traveling right-to-left in the scene. The ball is keyframed at frame 0 with a position of 0,0,-100 and at frame 10 with a position of 0,0,100. The ball's motion is linear; therefore, at frame 5 (midway between 0 and 10) the ball is at 0,0,0. In other words, with no motion blur applied, the ball should be dead center in the image.
That is not what I am seeing, depending on the "Shutter alignment" setting in the "MB" tab of the Render Target node. Only a "Shutter alignment" setting of "After" yields the expected result:
Also, no matter which "Shutter alignment" setting I choose, when motion blur is turned on I cannot get the blur to trail the object that is being blurred (think of a comet with a tail--that's the look I'm aiming for). OctaneRender seems to be ignoring the "Shutter Open" and "Shutter Efficiency" settings in LightWave; no matter what these are set at, the blur always seems to be in front of the moving object, which is completely wrong--the blur should be after the object. Making the "Shutter alignment" "Before", "Symmetric", or "After" only seems to be moving the position of the overall blurred object; it has no effect on where the blur is occurring on the object itself:
If I superimpose the non-blurred versions of the blue ball on top of the 25% blurred versions it's easier to visualize what I'm talking about. In all three cases, the non-blurred ball (which, remember, is moving right-to-left) is trailing the 25% blurred ball; the only thing that changes in each case is that the "Before" and "Symmetric" shutter angles visually put the object at the wrong location; only the "After" shutter angle positions the ball where it should be (0,0,0). And again, no matter what combination of settings I use, I cannot get the blur to trail the non-blurred part of the object; the blur is always preceding the non-blurred part of the object. It's as if the tail of the comet is in front of the comet!
Is this behavior expected? Are the "Shutter Open" and "Shutter Efficiency" settings in LightWave not supported? Comments elsewhere about how motion blur works seemed to imply that the "Shutter Open" setting would affect how the blur is rendered but that doesn't seem to be the case. I can set the "Shutter Open" setting anywhere from -100% to 100% and renders look exactly the same.