Shade 7: this upgrade provides modeling tools for easily creating realistic scenes and objects.(Product/Service Evaluation)

When I heard that the folks who made Poser 3D character creation software had a new product, I was interested immediately. Curious Labs, now a division of E Frontier Inc., was founded in Santa Cruz, California, in April 2000 and boasts 200,000 users worldwide. In fact, Shade is used by more than 70 percent of Japan's 3D hobbyist and professional design markets.

Shade is offered in three flavors: Designer LE, Standard, and Professional editions, developed for everything from architectural design to 3D animation. Thanks to Shade's intuitive tools and real-time operation, designs quickly come to life. The new version is easy to master, affordable, and rich in professional features. A comprehensive design, modeling, and rendering tool set, Shade 7 includes basic to advanced modeling, lighting, and rendering tools.

Popular with power users, 3D animators, and artists, Shade 7 requires a fast CPU with lots of RAM. I tested the Standard and Professional versions on both a basic Windows PC and a Mac G4 PowerBook laptop. I found no difference between the Mac and Windows editions. Shade 7 proved easy to use and was equipped with enough tools and advanced features that most users might not outgrow it any time soon. Best of all, it is priced less than many similar software packages and provides a varied and flexible tool set. Shade also works well with other software programs through its support of an array of popular formats, including .OBJ. Moreover, it works almost seemlessly with Poser.

I successfully used the radiosity lighting and image/texture mapping features to create realistic-looking objects quickly. I was able to create a layout of a home addition in a snap. Easy to use and intuitive, Shade 7 also was fun to work with--something I can't say of many applications today. And, at press time, Curious Labs unveiled a free update to Shade 7.2. A new feature in 7.2, Image Based Lighting enables users to render without the presence of any light source.

The Standard and Professional versions go further than LE, supporting High Dynamic Range Lighting import and export. With 7.2, Flash export is now available so you can save animations to the industry-standard .SWF format. In addition, all three versions of Shade 7 ...