ActiveShade Engine Type greyed out

[Streetwise]

I've been playing around with ActiveShade for the first time and really like the way I can visualize stuff quickly. I'm wondering why the Engine type is greyed out in my render setup? Also, does ActiveShade even work with CPUs?

Lastly, I see you can add Render Servers to the mix. Is that to say that each server should have it's own beefy GPU? Mine are only set up for CPU rendering with cheap video cards.

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

The engine type as well as some of the other controls are greyed out while ActiveShade is running - to change it you have to first stop the rendering.

Active shade works with the CPUs when the engine type is set to CPU - in that case your GPUs are not used for rendering at all. You can use that option together with the render servers - you won't need a powerful video card in that case. You will need to start V-Ray RT render server on the other machines and not VRaySpawner like when doing DR with the Adv. renderer.

In case you want to try GPU rendering then it would be best to use the CUDA engine type (it's better for the nVidia cards you have). In that case you would need powerful videocards in the servers too if you want to use DR.
You can check the GPU FAQ for more details - http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/V...X/V-Ray+RT+FAQ

Best regards,
Yavor

[Streetwise]

Thanks for the information. Apparently I had it set to use the CPU's which I thought was cool. But when I switched it to CUDA, WOWEE! That's pretty amazing. I can see that I may need to beef up my cards a bit and maybe put my current one's in the render slaves. This is great!

Thanks again!