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I've checked the forums and every place I see that all I need to do in order to render particles (from Blender) in Octane is to assign a particle instance to the object serving as the particle. I've tried planes as hair - fail. I've tried monkeys as emitter - fail. Does anybody have a legitimate workflow or tutorial for this?

Hi, i've been able to render non dynamic hair.
I simply replaced them with a plane instanced (and stretched along the hair) with the particle-instance-modifier.
You might have to apply the particle-instance-modifier. That doesnt work for animations of course.

Thanks Fabian. I'll give it a try. Since my posting I was able to get emitter particle objects to render by using Dupli-Frames and telling it to make duplicates real. I tried the same with hair/planes and it's been making duplicates real for seven hours now. Think I'm going to have to kill it.

Big picture, I'm trying to render grass using the planes-as-hair method.

I finally got it. There are a couple of ways to do grass that can be exported from Blender to Octane. Here is a quick synopsis of the method I chose:
I created a ground plane and assigned a particle system (hair type) to it. I created a few blades of grass as an extruded plane and then created a group that included the grass blades. In the render section of the particle system I selected Group and selected my grass blade group. The next step (required to get it into Octane) is to open the modifier panel for the ground plane. There is a modifier for the particle system. Within the Particle System modifier, there is a Convert button. Clicking this button effectively makes our particles real. The grass blades can then be rendered within Octane.

Currently, I'm trying to find a good particle quantity that will not make Octane shit the bed. I keep getting an error telling me that the scene is too complex. If I go low enough it works.

I guess the Exporter vor Blender 2.58 (or 2.57b) does not automaticly export particle objects to Octane.
The Exporter for Blender 2.49b does this well.

But anyway: We have to be patience for Instancing support. I hope this will solve our grass- and carpet "problems"

Kind regards
Alain