When Octane first loads a mesh, the mesh's position may not be in the field of view. The only way to find it is to set the target position to 0,0,0, and zoom out in an attempt to locate it by eye. This is not always a quick thing to do. It would be neat if you could tell Octane to center a mesh in the FOV, by right-clicking its node in the node tree and selecting, "Look at Mesh".