I guess it's by now obvious to most everyone that Carrara is dead, even if Daz has not officially released a statement to that effect. So it's time to move on to other 3D tools. Shade3D is one of them. See This Link, and See This Link, and See This Link.

Shade3D's UI is not as polished as Carrara's. In many ways it follows a different 'mindset' than Carrara, which makes it a bit strange and difficult to get a handle on. But once you read the manuals and watch few turtorials, it all makes sense and it's actually very easy to use.

Shade3D has support for Poser content through the Poser Fusion plugin. Daz/Poser contents can also be imported from Daz Studio into Shade very easily (See This Link)

Shade3D's strongest point is its particularly well-designed and accurate lighting features and its super-fast GI, which lets you get eye-popping renders very quickly.

Here is a first render that I did with Shade 15 on a quad core 4.0 GHz i7 iMac. The only shaders that I tweaked are the floor and the monitors on the wall. The remaining shaders are unmodified and imported through FBX. So it looks like Shade3D is actually more Poser-Content-Ready than Carrara.

Also note the GI quality. The render uses only 3 lights, the rest of the magic is done by Shade3D's GI. The render (1920x1080 @ 96 DPI) took 1 hour and 8 minutes with most render parameters set near their limits. I think with the proper tweaking of render parameters, Shade3D is able to output super high quality results worthy of the most demanding production studios.

In next articles I will review Shade3D's modeling and animation features, if I have time.

Could use Studio with a bunch of plugins. The Pro version of Shade is $450. Here are some plugins for Studio

Hair - Carrara native dynamic hair -  Studio plugin Look at my hair 49.94

Multipass Rendering - Carrara native multipass renderer - Studio plugin mask and multipass 19.95 

Replicators - Carrara native grid replicator and surface replicator - Daz instancing and plugin ultrascatter 29.95

Terrain heightmap - Carrara native terran editor - Daz bridge to Bryce 19.95 

Vertex modeling - Carrara native vertex modeler - Daz Bridge to Hexagon  19.95 

Realistic sky - Carrara native realistic sky editor - Daz Terradome 39.97 

Line rendering - Carrara native NPR - Studio plugin 24.47  Line Rendering 9000 

If you own a previous version of Shade going back to version 9 you can get an upgrade pricing which is not offered at Daz3D the upgrade pricing if you own a previous version is up to almost 50% depending on which version you decided to purchase https://shade3d.jp/en/products/shade3d/buy.html the one major draw back that there are not many Shade3d tutorials the newest ones are only focus on Shade3d 15 which is fine but their Youtube channel for these tutorials are no sound or explaining so a little bit difficult to follow that has been one reason for my reluctance to upgrade just yet

@ diomede:

If you plan to turn Daz Studio into a full-featured 3D app by buying loads of plugins, well I wish you good luck. A much better solution would be to just shell-out $3K or $4K or even $5K to buy Maya, or 3DS Max, or Houdini, or Cinema 4D Studio. It will cost you a lot less, and it will be a lot less headache too.

Daz Studio, even augmented with a ton of plugins, is only a cute toy to play with content. Although it does a very good job at exporting contents into other platforms.

In the affordable price range, worthy replacements for Carrara at this time are Cheetah3D ($99.-, but Mac only), Shade3D ($449.- for the Pro version), and Lightwave ($695.-). This thread is devoted to Shade3D, but I plan to review the other 2 apps as well in the near future, if I have time.

I look forward to your finding there use to be a dedicated Shade3D forum here but due to lack of participation it was closed perhaps it can be renewed

Carrara is no longer getting updates, as far as I know. I want to replace the functionality of Carrara and preserve the ability to use most of the 3D content that I already have. I listed the functions of Carrara, and listed plugins for Studio that replace those functions. Studio is the anti-headache software. It is designed for ease of use with lots of support for ease of learning. It is the opposite of headaches. Depending on sale prices, the plugins that I listed (which includes the ability to make custom content, not just pose other people's content) total to about $150-$200.

Sounds like Cheetah and Shade are great. Look forward to hearing more about them.

@ 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.

diomede posted at 2:17PM Fri, 21 October 2016 - #4287281

Carrara is no longer getting updates, as far as I know. I want to replace the functionality of Carrara and preserve the ability to use most of the 3D content that I already have.

I agree, but I just don't think its out there. I've seen others with the same opinion both here and at DAZ (PhilW, other knowledgeable users). In particular, the seamless support for Poser figures (loaded from Carrara's browser, and fully animateable - Poser Fusion not required). My 3D content (LOTS!) has all been picked with Carrara in mind, and works fine. I also think DAZ has no plans for Carrara updates, but the program is very useable now, so I'm not actively looking for a replacement. I guess the day will come when a new version of Windows won't support it, but I plan to keep a machine running with Win7 for a very long time (with help from the local shop that built the machine). I've done this for other programs, e.g. Adobe Pagemaker on WinXP, basically a dedicated laptop that runs it once a month for a newsletter.

I've recently been doing a project in Vue because of its special features, a good program, but man is it hard to re-adjust to its UI, features, etc. Carrara is basically second nature now. I dread having to switch ...

+1

Been interested in Shade for a while. It will be good to hear about your experience.

Hi Everyone -

I have re-opened the Shade3D forum and gallery. I hope you all find them useful and interact in them

You can find the forum by clicking HERE

You can find the gallery by clicking HERE

Thanks KristiS!

KristiS posted at 6:08AM Thu, 03 November 2016 - #4288498

Hi Everyone -

I have re-opened the Shade3D forum and gallery. I hope you all find them useful and interact in them

You can find the forum by clicking HERE

You can find the gallery by clicking HERE

OK, thanks, I will go to the Shade forum if I want to learn more about that program, and for the next review. Gallery would be great. Very responsive admin. Appreciate it.

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.

dr_bernie posted at 3:30PM Thu, 03 November 2016 - #4288746 ... I will go into a detailed review of its texture system and its animation features, and how they compare to Carrara.

The render looks good, nice work. I'm looking forward to the animation features, in particular how Poser Figures can be animated, especially V4, M4, K4 and associated clothing.

dr_bernie, I really love your image! I wouldn't mind sitting in one of those chairs and reading a book right about now.

I'm glad Poser content is working in Shade3D!

Can't wait to see what else you come up with!

Looks, great, Dr. Bernie. Could someone please load and manipulate posed figures in Shade. Carrara can load and render static props. Carrara can load and render posed Poser 1-7 and Daz V/M1-4 and Genesis 1-2 figures. We don't need a substitute for those. The current issue is that neither Poser 9+ weightmapped figures nor Daz Genesis 3 are supported. Because the rigging systems are the issue, not the meshes, we can anticipate that the same problems will apply to many future figures for dogs, cats, animals, fish, birds, etc.

@ chelseawilliams, Steve K., diomede: Thanks for your comments.

What I like about Shade3D's native renderer is its ability to create images with an 'opulent' atmosphere. I have looked at images produced by top-notch renderers like VRay or Maxwell or alike. They all look sensational, but they look 'cold', without any real atmosphere, like a painting done by a robot.

Please stay tuned for more in-depth reviews of Shade3D's features.

Please also note that this is not a 'Carrara-bashing' thread. Quite to the contrary. There are tasks that are handled better in Carrara than in Shade3D, and I will point them out as I go along. My goal in this thread is to provide some pointers on how to move-on from Carrara to another platform, for those users who wish to do so.

It is great software

I still use Carrara 5.1 Pro in Windows 10 for all my projects. I didn't know it was dead.

ShawnDriscoll posted at 2:14AM Sat, 03 December 2016 - #4290409

I still use Carrara 5.1 Pro in Windows 10 for all my projects. I didn't know it was dead.

DAZ is just trying to bury it I think, but it continues to claw its way out of the grave

Going back to Shade3D, that I had to set aside because of other occupations. I hope some of the Carrara users will find it interesting reading.

First, few generalities about Shade3D:

1. Shade is actually quite easy to learn, despite its reputation for being cryptic. In my estimate 2 weeks of full-time work and careful reading of the manuals should be enough to make you an mid-level Shade artist. Using Shade3D for about a month should make you enough proficient to produce some breathtaking art, assuming that you have prior knowledge of a 3D app, say Carrara.

2. A very strong point of Shade3D is its OpenGL preview screen. It is surprisingly accurate, lighting-wise,, i.e. it displays a preview that is quite close to the final rendered output. Not only that, the preview screen is also particularly fast and responsive, so much so that you have to set the camera speed to 'Slow' to avoid annoying jerky movements, assuming that you have a high-power graphics card.

3. Shade's camera is not a 'free' camera like Carrara's, i.e. you can't move it around the scene at your own will. It has an 'eye' and a 'target', and the camera always moves toward the target, and it stops when it gets there. For a Carrara user this may need some getting used to, but Cinema4D camera also behaves the same way..

4. Shade3D's camera, just like Carrara's, is not a true camera, i.e it does not have parameters to adjust aperture or shutter speed or iso sensitivity. It only has a focal distance, but it gets the job done.

5. To use Shade a dual-monitor set-up is recommended. Not that a single monitor won't do it, but only that a dual-monitor set-up is a lot more comfortable.

6. Shade lets you define custom workspaces to your liking, but somehow Shade has a tendency to move your layout by a few pixels each time you start the program. This is irritating, and I have not yet figured-out a way to correct it.

7. Shade's support for Daz/Poser content is, from what I can tell, actually better than Carrara's, in the sense that textures that are brought into Shade look quite similar to the way they look in Poser and you don't need to tweak them extensively to make them look good, unlike Carrara where you have to spend hours adjusting textures.

8. Daz/Poser contents can be brought into Shade either through FBX export/import, or through the built-in PoserFusion plugin, in which case you would need Poser. Either way the import works nicely, although I had a couple of instances where the FBX route didn't work, or maybe I did something wrong.

9. Unlike Carrara, Shade3D does not have a 'Consolidate Duplicate Shaders' function. This may look annoying at first, but Shade3D has a 'Register Master Shader' function, where you register a shader as a master shader, and then assign it to as many surfaces as you want. It's not that bad, but my preference goes to the 'Consolidate Duplicate Shaders' in Carrara.

10. Shade is particularly reliable and robust. The version 16.1 that I am using can be used for hours at a time without any glitch.

So what conclusion can be drawn from this long story? Well every 3D app has its strength and weaknesses. Some things are done better in Shade and some things are better handled by Carrara. When it comes to strictly using Daz/Poser content, my conclusion is that Shade3D lets you finish a project faster and at a far better render quality than Carrara, assuming that you use the native renderers in both apps.

Next-up, I will go into a detailed review of Shade3D's lighting, texturing and animation features as they compare to Carrara's, if I have time.

I have mentioned 10 points in my post above. There is an 11th point, which is probably the most important of them all. Here it is:

1. Shade uses a relatively large point size in its interface, so it is particularly easy on the eyes for those users who have weak eyesight, because text information is very easy to read. Not only that, but Shade is designed so that if you turn the background color to dark, the text automatically becomes bright, and vice-versa if you turn the background color to bright the text becomes automatically dark. The combination of large, very readable text, and a very well-thought contrast mechanism between the background color and the text color makes Shade very usable for long hours, without any noticeable eye fatigue. Carrara in that respect gets very low marks. The 8.1.1.12 version of Carrara (which is the last version of Carrara that is acceptable to me) has small black text on dark background, which is very hard to read, unless you have nearly 20/20 eyesight. You can of course change the background color in Carrara, but the text color cannot be changed. This is a major disqualifying factor for Carrara as far as I am concerned, because of the stress it imposes on the eyes over extended periods of use.

We can change the text color in Carrara, mine is yellow to se it on a white background... But the Shade's system is really cool!

@ DUDU.car: I didn't know you can change the text color in Carrara. In fact I am sure you can't.

Are you saying that in Carrara you can set the text color to bright and the background color to dark everywhere, including the scene tree, the properties panel, the timeline, the library, basically everywhere? And also change the color of the tiny little triangles to bright too, so they are visible on a dark background?

As I mentioned above, from the point of view of readability and the least amount of eye fatigue, Shade's UI is truly a joy to use. This fact alone probably justifies its relatively high, and rather odd price of $666.-

Yes you are right, I changed the text color on the up left corner in the rooms (Cameras views) to see the text with a very white scene. The UI text is still in white with a black background. I will try to see Shade3D by curiosity.

Thanks. I'd be very curious to see how a Carrara screenshot looks like. IAs you can imagine I don't have Carrara on my computer anymore.

Here are 2 screenshots of Shade, one wiith all the panels, the other with the timeline. As you can see it's all very readable without much stress to the eyes. Although your browser might scale the images. To see exactly the size of the UI text, you may have to copy and paste the images into Paint.

Shade3D is a truly amazing, and very easy to use. As a Maya user in these forums said: 'Shade3D can kick some serious ass'. Unfortunately I cannot find his post.

Here is an interview with Adam Kuczek, an accomplished Shade3D user along with some of his works. See Link.

maybe bad news for you: https://shade3d.jp/en/news/79.html

Tanja3D - you mean this?

"Notice Regarding Shade3D ver.17 English

Shade3D Co., Ltd. regrets to announce that due to various reasons the English-language version of Shade3D ver.17 is no longer planned for release. We deeply apologize for inconveniencing our overseas users who were looking forward to using the software.

News concerning the next English-language version of Shade3D will be announced on our website at the earliest appropriate time.

Thank you for your understanding and for your continued use of Shade3D.

March 2018"

In March 2018 they announced that no English version of Shade 17 will be released, probably because on June 15th 2018, i.e. today, they released Shade 18 (See This Link). It was pointless to make an English version only to have it superseded 4 months later.

Shade is among the very rare 3D apps to get a major update almost every year.

thank you for the link dr. Bernie but what they say? my japanese is poor

Tanja3D posted at 2:47AM Sun, 17 June 2018 - #4331850

thank you for the link dr. Bernie but what they say? my japanese is poor

The link says Shafe3D ver. 18, in very English. It means Shade 18 is released. Hopefully there will soon be an English version too. If not you will have to learn Japanese, which isn't a bad thing.

Lol

dr_bernie posted at 8:24PM Sun, 17 June 2018 - #4331874

Tanja3D posted at 2:47AM Sun, 17 June 2018 - #4331850

thank you for the link dr. Bernie but what they say? my japanese is poor

The link says Shafe3D ver. 18, in very English. It means Shade 18 is released. Hopefully there will soon be an English version too. If not you will have to learn Japanese, which isn't a bad thing.

you try to learn carrara instead, dr. Bernie, isn't a bad thing (and easier than japanese)

Several questions were asked by DustRider regarding Shade3D in this thread (See Link). Since that thread topic is the creation of a vampire effect in Carrara, I thought it would be more appropriate to answer the questions here.

1. Regarding the contents in the image below: The room is Jack Tomalin's excellent model Baroque Grandeur. The mirror is a prop from Jack Tomalin's The Library, and the model is The Orange Girl.

1. The scene was built in Poser and brought into Shade3D through PoserFusion.

2. The scene could have been built in Daz Studio and brought into Shade#D through FBX export See Link.

3. The FBX export from Daz Studio preserves the skeleton structure, so the poseability is not lost. But the FBX export for complex models could be a bit of hit and miss, so you may have to bring the model by small chunks.

4. The Poser Fusion does an excellent job at bringing Poser content into Shade with all the texture mostly intact. The image below rendered in Shade3D had no shader tweaking whatsoever, except the rug where the diffuse value had to be lowered because it was too bright.

In a next article I will explain why one should use Shade3D, and not Carrara. Stay tuned...

I was going to do a little write-up about why to use Poser - and Poser Fusion - along with your favorite 3D app, but then I ran into this excellent tutorial by Mark Bremmer (See Link), who spells it out far better than I ever could.

You can use all of your Poser compliant content library, along with their morph dials, within Poser with seamless access inside your 3D app, including 3DS Max, Maya, Cinema4D, Lightwave, Vue, Shade3D, and possibly others.

For Daz specific contents, the FBX export from Daz Studio works also just fine most of the times, if you are willing to pay the price of a simple export/import.

BTW, most of the JCM/FBM dials in Carrara never worked for me, especially for clothing items.

Thanks dr_bernie for responding to my questions from the other thread. While Shade3D looks very interesting, and is no doubt a great product (I actually own an old version ... 6??? ...), and has some great modeling and rendering tools. But for me, it would have to offer a lot to get me to want to use it with Poser Fusion.

Marks video makes it sound tempting, but the issues with seams on the un-welded body parts looks, well, lets just say pretty bad and a big step backward IMHO (maybe Shade handles this better??). Plus with Shade it seems that anyone who doesn't speak/read Japanese will be stuck using the version that came out in 2016 for the foreseeable future. Again, from my point of view not ideal.

I just can't see why I would switch (and invest more $$$) to a Shade/Poser workflow when I can use easily use almost everything up to Genesis 2 in Carrara with no export/import/hosting issues (and use Misty's work arounds for G3/G8). Yes, it would seem that Carrara development is dead, but for all intents and purposes it would seam that English development of Shade 3D is dead as well. Plus, Poser IMHO seems to be on life support (just look at how few people participate in the forums now, and how the number of new products/content has dropped in the past few years), and nobody except for Smith Micro knows what the next version will be (and if they will continue to develop the Poser Fusion SDK).

Thanks again for all the info, but for now I think I'll stick with DS and Carrara (I own PoserPro 2014, but don't use it anymore, for me, DS, and Carrara (plus Octane render) provide much better results, and fewer hassles. But I'm glad you found an alternative you like. Please let us know if the newest version of Shade3D ever gets an English version. I'm sure some people in the Poser forum might find this interesting, and possibly in the Shade 3D forum (though it looks like it gets virtually no traffic, probably because of the lack of English version updates).

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, while FBX and sometimes Collada export of Genesis figures does work, often the morphs (and/or JCM.s) are lost on import. The "Genesis 8 to Maya" plugin solves this for Genesis 8 and Maya, and it appears that the Diffeomorphic plugin has solved this for Blender, But AFAIK, the morphs, or "shapes keys', are lost in other software (i.e. Lightwave, 3DS Max, C4D, etc.), though I do think that iClone imports everything, so I could be wrong about some of the other software mentioned (I do know from experience that without the plugins, Maya and Blender don't import all the morphs in a usable fashion).

Since I'm pretty sure that at some point, without updates from DAZ, Carrara, I will eventually need to move on from Carrara. So I am begrudgingly looking for something to augment Carrara for now, and probably eventually replace it. The best low cost option for me seems to be the upcoming Blender 2.8 with it's new interface and Diffeomorphic. But I'd much rather stay with Carrara, if DAZ makes that possible (the new iClone and CC3 also lost interesting, but expensive).

@ DustRider:

I have read through your comments, and your points are well taken. So let me answer them here.

Shad3D is not dead. They have consistently released one new version every year since 2016. It's the English version that is lagging behind. Carrara OTOH is dead. No Carrara 9 will ever be released. Daz does not have the resources for it. End of the story.

I agree that Carrara's strong point is the built-in support for DAZ/Poser content. But the strength stops here. Once you have loaded the content, you must spend hours, if not days adjusting the Poser textures to make them look good in Carrara. Then you must spend an inordinate amount of time with Carrara's ipoor and naccurate lighting to get a render that looks like a photo shot with a cheap $19.99 camera equipped with a plastic lens.

With Shade3D one spends a little longer to build the scene in Poser and load it in Shade, but after that things happen very quickly, because Poser textures need very little adjustments in Shade, and Shade's superbly accurate lighting system has the potential, in the hands of an expert, to create jaw-dropping scenes quickly, for an output that looks like a photo shot with a professional $5,000.- camera.

So if you look at not just one strong point, but at the OVERALL cost of a project, Shade3D lets you finish a project a lot faster, a lot cheaper, and with a lot higher quality too, than Carrara.

What I said above applies equally well to Lightwave, IClone, and Cheetah3D, when compared to Carrara, but I will discuss them in separate threads.