I was thinking about Blender & Octane relationship. We know that:
* RS is going for integration of Octane into 3D packages, which is great and the right way to go, except that it won't happen for Blender, because of conflicting licensing between Blender & Octane SDK for integration. That leaves us with "Octane standalone" and an exporter = the way we work now. But:
* There is no official Octane exporter for Blender 2.5x. We have the great exporter that Lionel (aka Yoyoz) coded months ago and it's still working well for the latest Blender updates. But we cannot expect that this exporter will work for all future versions, like 2.6x. It might work or it might not. Some time in the future, there will possibly be an Octane scene file rewrite that will replace .obj (or maybe not?; see the first point). This might render this exporter useless. We also can't expect support & updates from Lionel, because this was his hobby non RS sanctioned project and it all falls on his available time & will to do updates. Again, he might or he might not.
That's a lot of uncertainty. My questions for RS are:
1.) Will in the future "Octane standalone" & the integrated versions differ in features? And I mean rendering / shading / lighting features, not stuff that is a specific result of the integration. Will Octane development shift to the integrated versions and so will the standalone version lag behind or even be left out?
2.) Will there be an official Octane exporter for Blender 2.5x/2.6x? Has RS any plans on this?