The following were done with Blender/Octane. The heads all utilize Octane materials from their live database. The grass is just particle grass in Blender where I told it to make the duplicates real. This makes it a mesh that Octane can handle. All images also utilize HDR images for the environment as they tend to make reflective surfaces really come to life.
Please share some more such attractive images.
The first one is perfect! If it had a better background (other than the hdri) that would make an awsome wallpaper! (or maybe a splash for blender? :P)
How long did these renders take? I hear Octane’s absurdly fast. And what exporter did you use from Blender to Octane?
Octane’s speed is related to the GPU (video card). In general, GPUs are much faster than CPUs (hence the increase in render speed). The faster the video card, the faster the render. You can also use multiple GPUs, which speeds renders up even more (although they have run into some glitches with this recently which they are working on fixing).
Octane only accepts OBJ / MTL files at the moment.
If you don’t mind sharing your first image blend file please do.
Octane customers get a export plugin for blender 2.49 and 2.57 and there you get also animation support.
Cheers, mib.
mib2berlin, i did not know that, thank you. good to know!
GeoPappas, ah yes, thank you. I did in fact forget that it’s a GPU based renderer. I looked into it about half a year ago, and I remember now why I stopped looking into it - it requires an NVidia graphics card, which I don’t have 
For y’all that use Octane, does it render motion blur in animations?
Edit: I shoulda checked their website before asking that, I see that it does.