I'm a photographer and use Octane to make plates for my studio shooting... in fact ... I'm trying.
My workflow : I buy 3D assets in DAZ studio or some Kitbash3D, redo all materials and render in Octane.
Most of the time my lights are material with emissive applied to a part of an objet (light bulb, signs, neon)...
...and with this workflow my rendering time is VERY bad :
I have a lot of noise and hs to wait for soooooooooo much time.
In comparison, I bought a lot of tutorials and the scenes are rendered much much quicker... and I think it's mainly because of my way to manage light instead of having source light with very simple shape.
I try every new Octane version... and I had a lot of expectation with RTX card (I have a RTX2080ti and 3 older NVIDIA cards)... but my boost is always around x1... yes, no boost at all.
Can somebody confirm, what I suspect? To have a very good render time you have to make very simple light source?
Here is a scene I have rendered. So a nice HDRi and a lot of small light source... I had to put a lot of fake smoke to mask all the noise I can't get ride of even with a VERY long render time.
P.S. I'm a noob in 3D... so my example reflect that... sorry.
regards
Nicolas