It's always inspiring for us to see outstanding 3D art rendered with Octane. It's even more inspiring when that art is picked up by other CG centered websites. The AREA just posted a terrific interview with Hugues Giboire (ElBloko on the forum), the artist behind the very impressive "Shades of Dambu" and an in-depth tutorial on his workflow.
You can read the full tutorial and interview here:
A Lifelike Portrait: Breaking Down Photorealism (OctaneRender tutorial)
Interview with Hugues Giboire
A short snippet from the tutorial:
If it had to be photorealistic, then I needed to integrate a really good rendering engine into to my toolbelt. I chose a GPU-based unbiased renderer for that task. Octane Render is a small, easy to learn software but it has deep possibilities that are still growing. Most importantly, it allows me to easily and steadily move towards my own vision without losing it; I use it in a repeat fashion from the beginning to the end of the process to constantly preview that my work is going in the right direction. The best of all is that Octane Render's speed of convergence allow for a near-real-time creation process. As with painting or drawing, the immediacy of the results allows for an immediate reaction. It then falls to trusting that an anomaly should be corrected, making the change, and returning to reach the next level of detail.
P.S. ElBloko posted some WIP images of a brand new project today
Cheers!
the OctaneRender team