Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

19 Mac 2001

Mac3D: New version of Shade Professional and Personal

ExpressionTools has new versions of its advanced 3D modeling and high-quality rendering and animation software. Its flagship application, Shade Professional Release 5 English, is now available today (December 19, 2001) and Shade Personal Release 5 English will be available in mid January, 2002. The prices for each are $1,499US and $499US, respectively, and are sold through the ExpressionTools Web site.

Shade Professional Release 5 English

Shade Professional 5 features powerful modeling capabilities, including Unique Curved Surface Interface capabilities, MetaMesh and MetaShapes, in addition to polygonal, Polygon Mesh Rounding and Boolean modeling. There are also Skin and Ball Joint functions.

The program incorporates Inverse Kinematics, Slow-in/Slow-out features and other independent Motion Settings. With the MetaParticles Renderer you can create fluid animation in which Forced Balls are used to set gravity and reflective coefficients for spheres.

Shade Pro features ScanLine, Raytracing, Distributed Raytracing, and Radiosity rendering methods. Shade Professional also has support for multiple processors for faster rendering and, with a plugin, support for distributed render processing over a network.

Shade Personal Release 5 English

Shade Personal offers a majority of the functions of Shade Professional, including all of the key modeling tools and rendering modes, including Radiosity. It also supports DXF import/export, IGES 5.3 Export and GDL Export.

Some of the key differences are that the Personal edition limits the maximum rendering size to 4,000x4,000 pixels. Other items not found in the Personal edition include the Image Cache, Stand-Alone Renderer, network rendering server support, saving Radiosity solution results, exposure adjustment in Radiosity and Raytrace shadow mapping.

Additionally, some other missing items found only in the Pro version include Forced Balls, Field Rendering and MetaParticles Renderer. There is also no 3D StudioMax support (not particularly useful to Mac users anyway) and LightWave 3D import/export in the Personal edition. QuickTime 5 Pro is also included with Shade Professional while QuickTime 5 Standard comes with Shade Personal.

Yet despite these items, the Shade R5 Personal version is a very capable rendering tool and modeler, allowing flexible import of models via DXF.

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Mac3D: New Image Gallery of Shade Professional R5