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.