@ diomede, @ Lobo3433

Thank you guys for your interest in this thread. I hope others will find it useful too.

About Shade's UI: I mentioned in my first post that Shade's UI is a bit 'strange', with a different 'mindset'. Not really so. It takes a day or two of full time work with Shade, and everything falls neatly into place and feels quite natural actually. Shade's OpenGL 3D view is very responsive and fast, to the point that you must set the camera speed to 'Slow', otherwise it's too difficult to control.

With Shade you are almost required to work with 4 views: Perspective, Top, Right, Front. But I assume that is how most CG artists work anyway. Working in 4 views lets you position lights and cameras very accurately in your scene.

The thing that I like most about Shade's UI is that the native font size is quite large, and it can be made even slightly larger with a free script downloadable from Shade's web site. For people with diminishing eyesight this fact alone makes Shade very comfortable to use over long hours. Also when you make the color of the panels darker to reduce eye strain, the text color automatically becomes brighter, so you are not stuck with unreadable black text over a dark background.

About Shade's Modeling: I am not much of a modeler myself. The whole purpose of using pre-made contents is to not do any modeling. I refer you to this video (See This Link). It is my understanding that all the modeling in this clip was done with Shade, which gives an idea of Shade's modeling abilities.

About Shade's Particle System: I have only briefly explored this feature, but I refer you to this video (See This Link). Look at the cemetery sequence and the space war sequences. The rain particles and the smoke and fire effects are strikingly photo-realistic. This proves that Shade has all the necessary tools to generate very interesting particle effects.

In my next post I will go into deep review of Shade's texturing, lighting and rendering abilities. Stay tuned.