Shade R5/E: expression tools' modeling package goes west.(Evaluation)

WHILE IT IS VIRTUALLY unknown in the US, Expression Tools' Shade is one of the oldest 3D packages in existence. The software was released in 1986 in Japan, where it has become very popular. Many of Japan's top designers and illustrators use Shade, and the company claims it is the preferred tool of the Japanese auto industry. I spent some time following links from the Shade Web site to the sites of various artists in Japan who use the software, and found that some of the images created with Shade are impressive. Shade was first translated to English last year with Version 4, and Version 5 quickly followed.

The software comes up with a fairly spartan four-pane interface. Most of the commands are contained in a couple of floating palettes, and are duplicated in a right-click contextual menu. It might be nice to bring some of the more common commands, such as translation and rotation, up to the top level of the interface to make it more efficient.

Modeling in Shade is unique: A surface consists of a collection of Bezier curves that are grouped into a hierarchy. All curves used to create an object are managed through a browser window, which allows you to maintain a full construction history of objects. All the component curves remain active, so you can tweak any curve, changing the resulting surface at any time. This method of modeling has power in its flexibility. Unfortunately, I found the learning curve pretty steep.

In addition to Bezier curve modeling, Shade supports metaballs and polygonal modeling, which has been enhanced with Version 5 to include subdivision surfaces. Another nice new modeling feature is magical sketch, which allows you to model objects somewhat as if you were drawing them. Drawing a simple line, for example, can produce an extruded 3D shape such as the tentacle of an octopus.

You can animate single objects in Shade or group them in hierarchies for more complex motions. For character animators, the software supports a joint system with inverse kinematics. In Shade, however, "joint" has multiple meanings. It can be used for skeletal animation, but joints can also be used to create sliders to animate other parameters, such as moving an object along a path.

For those using IK, Version 5 now sports a more robust IK system, with ball joints in simulate body parts such as shoulders. The now version also has enhanced skinning features, which allow for more complex weighting and ...