I've had shade 7le for about 4 hours.. so what do i think? well the poser import is fast and pretty acurate. see example.. the lighting is awsome... area lights,point light, sun light,ambient light.... and a few render engines.. the rendered example used 2 light.. ray trayced.. render time about 50 seconds.. amd xp2000...1 gig ram... the interface.. is imposible to work with at first... not very intuitive.. but when you get the hang of it.. it works.. radiosity.. well i'm sure it works great on low poly models... but if you think you can pop vicky in shade in see her in a global illumination envoirement.. unless you have a few hours to kill waiting... forget... i've tried to tweak the radiosity to lower the time needed to calculate... but it looks like even at the lowest settings, it could take an hour or so to calculate... (but then again.. i've only been playing with shade for about 6 hours now... if anyone else ,anaged to get radiosity to work.. please let me know how long it took. so, we'll see how it goes.. Nick

Thanks for the review. The price is hard to resist. Especially if it does everything they claim. Have you tried modelling in Shade?

one more......

I think 1 hour to calculate GI for a large image of a complex model is not too bad. The images are a little bright (try turning off ambient), shadows are hard-edged, but they're very nice. Is the bad bending and tearing of the hip/thigh joint on the trousers a result of the import operation? Or is it like that in Poser, prior to export?

my screen is actually quite dark... so i have a tendancy to overexpose a bit.. the tearing on the hip..was like that in poser.. it never conformed properly.. as far as modeling goes... i was able to model a box..after about ten minutes.. it seams to be a two step process... firt you draw a square,, then you have to find the extrude button.. and extrude it.. to turn it into a solid.... as far as i can tell.. you can't select items on the screen by clicking on them..you need to pick them from a drop down menu... but i could be wrong.. just maybe i haven't figured it out yet.

I've tried Shade 7le twice now, and know one thing. It will not start under 9x. :P I may try getting it to run under a WINE installation some time, but I doubt it would work all too well there either.

Hmmm. Okay, I guess I'm going to shell out for Shade. :-)

There are other Global Illumination options in Shade other than Radiosity. Try photon mapping or path tracing. After a while you'll find out the best method to use for different scenes. Try them out. There are a lot of shortcuts in Shade. For selecting items, adding/deleting control points, etc. There's even a palette where you can customise your shortcuts. If you don't want to use the drop down menus, I recommend getting into the shortcuts.

When i try to open a pz3 in shade the character is not posed as it was saved (from p5) is this a limitation of the demo version (shadeLE) or am i doing something wrong?

Hah! I haven't even figured out how to get a pz3 into shade yet :( Course, I'm almost certainly missing something -real- simple. slinks off to the corner to continue fiddling

under the "view" pull downs there is an option called "poserfusion" it will bring up a dialog. click on the "poser..." button and direct it to the direcory with poser in it. then click on the "open..." button to open the pz3

Shade looks okay. I tried the v7 demo, but the interface is grueling compared to other 3D apps - very nonintuitive (tooltips would be amazing). Seems that the interface was built from some basic GUI rather than using available OS GUI elements. Reminds me of a rudimentary Vue interface in ways. The price for Standard for Poser owners is excellent, but not certain if it can replace or augment C4D 8.5 XL in my workflow. Heck, for $149 it might be worth having to fiddle around. ;)

Thanks Tyger :) I shall give that a whirl.

Does it import poser animations or is it for static images only?

I need to see a lot more reviews & pics & stats before I shell out. Look forward to seeing more results.

Well, I have my copy of Shade standard on the way (luddite that I am, I have to have a box and hopefully a paper manual to go with it). We'll see how long it takes for the brain to wrap around the interface. I've got something hosed in my system regarding Acrobat; does anyone know if Shade supports G-buffer options?

Yes it can import full animations. The only limit is dynamic hair. - Noel

I'm also anxious to hear more....especially if Dale B. got a manual....one that is useful!! :)

I had the manual printed out (it was a pdf due to download) and I've been going through it. So far very well written. Good examples and for the most part very clear. I'm only on page 110 of 459 so far :) But I can say it isn't your normal dry, put you to sleep with techno jargen type manual. - Noel

That sounds propmising! I'll let you know about the manual Friday, poppe; that's when it is supposed to get here (I also wanna see what's involved in the distributed rendering).

HOW DO YOU TILT THE CAMERA? ...is what I'm thinkin at the moment. No dynamic hair? What about the P5 Material Room? Guess I should read on.

The camera controls are actually very easy to use. And you can make your own camera "views" with different settings. Dynamic Cloth and material rooms seem to work, they just mentioned dynamic hair but then again Vue has the same issue with dynamic hair (not sure what the issue is). - Noel

The camera controls are in the menu, View/Camera.

Poser 5 materials are not supported, unfortunately. At least, not in my tests. I loaded the standard sphere, applied a material shader, and saved as pz3. Then brought it into Shade and only got the default material. Texture maps on the other hand are fully supported as far as I can tell. Dynamic Cloth is supported also. All that said, I am very impressed so far. Can't wait until I am able to take full advantage of what is offered.

Not worried about the dynamic hair support; if E-on could do it with Mover 5, then unless there is some fundamental code bomb in Shade to prevent it, Poserfusion will support it soon, as well. The material room might be more of a challenge...but if it works...