Shade brings together advanced 3D modeling, rendering and animation into an integrated, flexible suite on Mac OS X and Windows. Use Shade as a complete, standalone tool set, or as a key design tool in your existing workflow. 32-bit and 64 bit hardware accelerated Shade with powerful ShadeGrid network rendering can scale easily to provide the fastest rendering possible.

Creating a model or a finished, rendered image or animation takes time. Every feature of Shade lets you work faster to produce high resolution, high quality art and animation. You can accomplish so many things with Shade:

Modeling for poly mesh, curved surfaces, boolean, meta blob objects, generate models from photos or illustrations
Create fully animated characters with animated natural hair, or bring them in using COLLADA or PoserFusion
Skin your models with multi-layered materials and unlimited maps, normal maps,displacement maps and more
Shade lighting supports IES data, HDR-based IBL lighting, volumetric lighting to create well lit, natural illumination
Render your scenes with breathtaking radiosity using multipass rendering, toon rendering or 3D stereoscopic images

Shade workflow interface is the result of years of customer feedback. Task based tool groups let you select, use and configure tool parameters within a single window. Snap to hide tools you aren't using right now, and restore them with a single step.

Volumetric materials allow you to create wide variety of effects. In addition to standard material attributes, control of Volume attributes such as Decay Distance, Scattering, Transparency and Glow.

Turn your digital camera into a 3D modeling tool with Photo Modeling. It works through assigning 3D faces to multiple photo images shot from different angles. In addition to 3D geometry, Photo Modeling also creates textures extracted from the photos you take.

You can transform a picture of a face using line shapes such as eyes, eyebrows and the mouth and a central line to link them together, such as a nose. Adding additional lines increases the detail.