Here is my first serious work with Shade3D. I chose the excellent Library model by Jack Tomalin, because I already used this model in a Carrara render, which I consider to be one of my best Carrara works so far (See Link). So I thought it would be interesting to compare the outputs from the two apps.

The first good news is that Shade3D works fairly well with Poser contents. Textures carry over into Shade3D very nicely and you don't need to tweak them as much as with Carrara to make them look good.

The FBX export from Daz Studio to Shade3D did not work for this model. It is surely a Shade3D issue, because the same FBX file loaded into Cheetah3D without a glitch. So to use Shade3D with Poser contents you need a recent version of Poser and import your scenes through the Poser Fusion plugin.

The bad news is that Shade3D does not have a 'Consolidate Duplicate Shaders' function like Carrara has. So if you insist on tweaking your shaders, you will need to go into each one of them, which could be quite tedious.

The good news is that Shade3D has a fairly simple to use Master Shader function. As its name indicates, you register a shader to be a Master Shader, then you select all shaders that you want to use this Master Shader. It's a bit annoying, bit it isn't all that bad.

Another good news: Shade3D's OpenGL preview is absolutely phenomenal. It shows relatively accurately all the lights in your scene, so you have a quite clear idea of how the final render will look like, and it's extremely fast and responsive too, to the point that I had to set the camera speed to 'slow', otherwise it was too jerky.

I have a bit of a mixed feelings about Shade3D's camera. It is not patterned after a DSLR or a camcorder, as you would expect in a 3D app. It kind of reminds me of my Descriptive Geometry classes in my college days. Shade3D behaves more like the cameras that civil engineers use for site surveys. It is a bit irritating to use at first, but once you spend a couple of hours to figure it out, it can be handled fairly easily.

The render above looks great on my iMac screen which, I believe, is calibrated. Please feel free to download the picture and adjust the colors to see how you like it.

Next I will do a couple of more renders with Shade3D, and I will go into a detailed review of its texture system and its animation features, and how they compare to Carrara.