Shade/Shape 3.0 released

Vision Effects has begun shipping the third edition of Shade/Shape, a program that converts 2D illustrations and animations into 3D models, complete with lighting, reflection and bump-maps. Version 3.0 makes several important changes: among these are better multithreading for increased rendering speed, and unclamped floating-point processing in After Effects 7.0 or later. Users can also decide to add bump-mapping after reflection-mapping, or drop ambient and diffuse intensities below 0 for effects such as shadow passes. Finally, normals have been enhanced with edge detection and altered -1 to 1 normal-mapping in Shade From Normals. Shade/Shape 3.0 costs $90 in full, but only $30 as an upgrade and $20 in a render-only license. Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher is required.

by MacNN Staff