So then, why the hell am I babbling on about Shade? Well, this announcement recently crossed my desk: How the heck can a package get to version 12 and nobodies heard of it? Easily… it’s big in Japan. I noticed along the way, while search for help on how to do certain tasks in Shade, nobody else has heard of it either! There just isn’t a ton of information out there. I downloaded the 30 day trial and I am rather impressed with this package, which I will be looking in to in a bit more depth later. In all of that time however, I don’t think I have ever even heard of Shade, which amazingly has been around since 1986 and is currently at version 12! I have followed the industry forever, used just about every 3D application out there, from the big guys like Max and Maya to the fringe like Nichimen nWorlds and Houdini. I spent my childhood dreaming of owning an SGI Indy with PowerAnimator.
This is a bit odd for me, as I have been a hobbyist in the 3D industry since the early DOS days when I purchased 3D Studio ( note, no MAX ) 4. Shade is the other contender entering the ring. It currently has a 45$ price-tag, which is about 1% of the cost of 3D Studio Max if you want to put that in perspective. The first is GameDraw, which is available in Unity or as a stand alone application on Mac, Windows, Linux and iPad. Therefore, a low cost/no cost editor that works within Unity is certainly welcome. Then you have to contend with the annoyances of getting your asset from the application and in to Unity, not always a seamless process.
Up until now, Blender and Cheetah3D on the Mac where you only options if you didn’t have several thousand dollars to spend. The biggest catch has always been the content creation side, take a look at our 3D application list for an idea of the typical price tag attached to these application. Prices range from free to around the 1,500$ mark. If you’ve not heard of it, Unity is a massively popular game creation suite, that enables developers to create games for PC, Mac, iOS, Android and more. Then a day later a different product was announced that also enables 3D asset creation within Unity. That piqued my interest for a few minutes, then something shiny came along and I forgot about it completely. Earlier this week I read about a recently launched 3D modeller that works within Unit圓D.
It’s odd how news arrives sometimes, it always seems to arrive in batches and today’s post is no exception.
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