At the moment, octane does not have directional light support. I do not mean IES, but directional plane and disc lights. Vray, Corona, Fstorm, and probably more, all have directional plane and disc lights, and it makes life so much easier. Do you plan on adding this functionality? If so, when? It can't be soon enough. Currently using IES for any sort of directional light adds so much noise into my scenes, that they become almost un-usable, and then I have to waste hours trying to balance light samples across all of the lights in my scene so that the noise clears up some what faster. Hopefully this will be added soon.
Thank you!