Thanks for the replies...
Spent some time on it this afternoon & even managed to convince the wife to print off the manual last yesterday.
Here's what I've found today...first of all I need to stipulate I have decided to ditch windows & maxwell, go the linux route but due to problems I've been having over the last near on four days, I quickly got a laptop going with windows & loaded max on to export clients model. So I won't be buying the max version which there isn't a demo of only a windows stand alone. Plus I'm not wanting to buy a license copy to see that it gives me the same problems, then I'm out of pocket as well as no render software
1. Max units is set to metres. The model is about 0.5m x 0.5m x 0.5m with a standard backdrop
2. Export to obj using Max's Blender default option
3. Open Blender (linux), go to setup & make sure it's set for metres, import the obj which is absolutely tiny on-screen, select a layer then zoom in on selected, model is fine. Note here that blender shows all objects on their individual layers in Outliner
4. Setup path, name & path to Octane exec, then render (note no camera setup)
5. Octane is set to import in metres...import mesh. First thing to notice nothing on the render window, 2nd things is that the model consists of 8 layers/objects in Blender, Octane shows the mesh with only 3 entities ?????
6. Now I'm back to same scenario as to trying to find the model in Octanes render window using the zoom with the shift key
So what I then did was on purpose scale up the model in Max, then went through all of the procedures above...when I pulled it into blender the "front view" showed the models backdrop filling the view at 10 metres - so the model isn't too small to be lost in Octane during the export.
I then set up a basic camera, click render & now I'm getting an error "Narcissic Camera Stop Looking At Yourself" even though the camera view shows what I want ?
I untick the export to camera option from Octane's settings & off it goes, opens up Octane but as above still can't find my model
What am I doing so obviously wrong?
Importing a model into this thing shouldn't be trial or error - aaaaahhhhhhh