I was thinking to my self today "What are the first things to pull off a external render-er".
Without going in to details of course with octane

but with just external renders in general
Luxrender, smallluxgpu, arion, mental ray, renderman etc what makes it tick?.
The first thing i thought to my self is that you need to be pretty hard core at math, something i clearly don't have and will never commit to [year/grade 11,12 and uni math the rest [10 and below] is pretty self explanatory].
So this is the first question. Do you need to have math skills to build gpu/cpu renders.
What is your skill in math octane team? phds? degrees?
The second is what makes it tick?
apart from the import obj button and the view port what are the steps in making in come up on screen and looking at the geometry?
And the third is, for octane are you creating your own code or is there certain lines of code that already exist but you need to implement it in so it can work?
cheers,
radiant