I am a Blender for Octane user since ...

[mib2berlin]

... the first Octane alpha 1 around January 2010.
There was not an addon/plugin these times, a user (yoyoz) wrote an exporter and gave it to the masses.
Cycles was not even born ...

When do you start with Octane?

Cheers, mib

[grimm]

I had been following Octane from 2009 but I didn't actually start using it until the Linux version came out at around the same time as you mib. I had just stopped using Indigo because it went commercial and they wanted more for it than my budget could handle. Haven't looked back since.

[Alain]

Good question.
My latest tests are more than a year ago.
The full integration of Octane into Blender did never convince me because it had alot of bugs and did not support needed features - Cycles was mutch more flexible and closer to production use.

Meanwhile Corona Render has become a very interesting competitor, but the Script for Blender has been stopped.

Conclusion:
The best for production use (architecture visualizations) is still 3D Studio Max and V-Ray (maybe Corona will be better one day...).

I fear that no one will ever take Blender for serious if he doesn't have to (because of money issues for example).

Kind regards
Alain

[kavorka]

We've been using Blender and Octane for over 4 years and it works great for us. Still use the script yoyoz created (modified a couple of things to work better with our workflow). It's not an excellent solution but it works well enough. I am going to get 1 license of the official plugin for 3.0 when it comes out (we have one for 1.x now) and see how far along it came, it might be production ready now.

[Alain]

What for what business do you create renderings ?

[kavorka]

Our company is pixelperfect-studios.com

We do renderings for office furniture dealers/manufactures, home builders and architects.