I had my Octane plugin for Houdini waiting on the shelf for too long. I decided to make small vignette environment in one day starting completely from scratch in the morning and finishing render in the evening. I have to say I really enjoyed responsiveness of GPU renderer and really fast render times. It allowed me to freely work on lighting and shaders with instant feedback. Despite the fact that Houdini implementation still needs some work, I think I will be moving more into Octane from now on.

Hope you will like the result! I'm thinking of doing some blog posts about working with Octane shaders in Houdini. Let me know in the comments if that's something you would be interested in.