Attached Link: http://youtu.be/F_TBlXipSYM

Here's a short movie animated in Carrara and rendered using the Octane plugin. 

http://youtu.be/F_TBlXipSYM

Hi, Tyrone !

I answers you on Carrarators but, what is this octane render ?

In what is it better than Carrara render ?

Nicely done your animation (scenario, images etc...) !

Attached Link: http://render.otoy.com/

Octane is a realtime physical-based renderer that uses your GPU (http://render.otoy.com/). This renderer can render full global illuminated scenes much faster than the Carrara built-in renderer. There is a standalone version as well as plugins for many different 3D packages and Carrara was just added to the list (you must purchase the standalone to use the plugin versions). The plugin allows you to see in a realtime viewport (at final render quality) the updates  you make to your materials/textures, lights, objects, etc. Its a wonderful thing to behold! 

So, as a test and to learn the plugin, I rendered this animation using the plugin and not my small (home-based) render farm. These frames rendered at an average of 25 seconds per frame (1280 x 720). There are a few lighting models (Direct Lighting, PMC, & Path Tracing) and which one you use as well as number of samples are the main things that affects the performance / render time per frame;Direct Lighting gives shorter times, PMC next, and then Path Tracing. For a chosen frame in this movie (indoor shot),  I noticed the following render times when switching between these at 1000 max samples:
Direct lighting - 28 seconds
PMC - 42 seconds
Path Tracing - 1 minute 40 seconds
But what you get depends on several things like the scene objects, materials, lighting, etc. The outdoor scene in this movie rendered at 28 seconds per frame when using Path Tracing. For the indoor shots (and since this was mostly a test) I used the Direct Lighting model because I didnt see a big enough difference to justify the longer render times.

Another key item that will impact performance will be your graphic card(s) and their CUDA CPUs. The more the merrier! I have two GTX 780's which are good performers.

I believe Carrara's renderer is very capable and I will probably still use it for some things in the future (especially since Octane does not support rendering everything; i.e Carrara hair). But the list of things it cannot handle is getting shorter as the developing is very focused on making updates to improve the plugin.