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After purchasing my second Octane license last night, I now have 2 machines, each with one GTX 480.
I will be adding more cards to both of them to make them ready for rendering an architecture animation project we are working on. The project is big, and I'm thinking of dividing the scene to much smaller ones, render 2 passes full and alpha as I saw a guide for this somewhere in the forum describing how to render alpha, then do the composition.

Any advices regarding this matter will help alot since I know it wont be an easy task, and will be very much appreciated of course

Anyway, this is the first test output for that project (a still frame).
Scene specs: pathtraced, maxDepth 4, Camera Ektachrome 64cd, texture env, 1920*1080 and scaled down to half.
Render time: 1min, reached ~250 samples.

Wow looks really good! Almost a little alienish also for some reason. Love the mood

I just did a pretty huge architectural project on Octane, from my experience here is a couple of tips:
- Don't be afraid of polygons, it can handle lots with little performance impact, but be aware of textures, those can eat your vram away. I had 1,5M poly using under 300Mb and octane runing smooth as hell.
- Pack your textures, Octane has a limit on how many different texture files it can handdle, so pack some of your textures so you can have more variation with fewer texture maps, also reuse them as much as you can 'cause once in the scene doesn't matter in how many materials they are in.
- When in doubt choose a mesh over opacity, opacity maps kill the performance, so it's better IMO to make "holes" in your mesh in almost any situation.
- For the alpha make two copies of your mesh, one the regular mesh, and the other one the "all black" one with plain diffuse materials for the matte objects, black diffuse with a little opacity for the glass, and black with opacity map for the clipped images, you can load both in octane set the camera and switch to the "alpha mesh" once the other shot is done, or easily batch render both from command line.
-If it's for you, there is no problem, but if you have an external client be aware of showing test renders to early, octane is too damm fast and they'll think they can make lots of changes with the same deadline, althou that it's true, it's a total pain.
Have fun, if I can think of anything else I'll add it later

Ryoko: Glad you like it, although it still needs alot to be done

kubo: Thanks alot for the very useful tips. The project is a 2 minutes and half animation for a client. Last night I tried to render some animation tests and I faced two problems:

1- When exporting from max2011 using an octane scene that i pre-prepared, after hiting render animation (camera only), the plugin launches octane, open the scene and the odd thing is that it loads the obj twice (in the vram it takes the ram of one object) before octane starts its render ! Of course this a huge time waste, do you have any idea why this is happening?

2- The import time for octane is big, any tips that can reduce that time? A way of making the .obj file in the first place maybe?

Another thing, its either I use skylight or texture env., which do you think will serve me better? I like the texture env. but it doesnt give me any control on the shadows, cant I use both?

1.- I'm not certain what you mean, but the way octane handles it is first it opens the scene (ocs file) there it checks the whole geometry and voxelizes it, then (if your using the plugin) it loads the mesh node in the memory (is that the two loads you are refering to?). That's the usual procedure, and there is not much that can be done atm, in most scenes loading time can be more time consuming than rendering time, I know that this is something that has improved from prior versions, and I'm sure it will improve further, and I think in future updates will we able to do the same without loading the mesh on a per frame basis. The camera only export in the plugin cuts short by not exporting again the obj file, which depending on your mesh is quite time consuming also.
2. I'm not certain which variables affect loading times, I'm sure Radiance could explain this, but I've had high poly count scenes with pretty short voxelizing time, and smaller ones that took forever. I do know that you need lots of RAM for that part and if there is not enough in 32 bit systems octane will shut down and in 64 it will slow down as it swaps RAM memory with HD, but I've got 12Gb on a 64 windows, and I haven't figured out yet why some scenes will take longer than others, it could be the ones with more number of objects regardless of its size, at least that affects the obj export, it could be a draw back of the obj file type.
3. I prefer skylight cause usually in architecture strong defined shadows help to show those small details, but HDRI's give an overall more interesting color, right now they can't be mixed, but Radiance, in another thread has promised to add that feature. Keep in mind that in this version the sun doesn't go thru transparent materials, so If you plan your shots right you can use skylight, (it's faster also and it renders fewer fireflyes) but if you need to see the sun coming thru glass you'll have to use HDRI's.

BTW I also liked your render, it has a nice mood to it, I just forgot to tell you

1- Yes I know what you are talking about, but what happens in my case is that octane does this whole operation twice, meaning after finishing the voxelization it re-starts the whole process from the beginning, re-checking the geometry, re-importing the textures and re-voxelize the mesh. As I mentioned it takes the space of one obj in the vram, not a duplicate, which means it overwrite the one it imported the first time. So strange.

2- I agree with you regarding the variables affecting loading time, would Radiance and Refractive team give us some information on that, this will help e.g. we can avoid making scenes with lots of objects (attach them together is a solution) if this will decrease the loading time.

3- I thought of adding an hdri hemisphere to the scene and use the area light technique that is mentioned in the forum while lighting the scene with skylight?!

Thanks for your encouragement regarding my render

if you add a hemisphere to act as background don't use an hdri texture, you'll get fireflies as crazy, there is some examples of using hdri's as materials, check face's threads about it, and it takes a lot of time to give a clean render, so just use a plain image to solve the reflections and sunlight as lighting.