TOKYO — Shade3D Co., Ltd. (http://shade3d.jp/en) has formed a new company and bought the sales, development and marketing rights of Shade 3D from longtime owner, E-Frontier in Japan. Shade 3D is a 3D modeling, animation and rendering software for Mac OS X and Windows that was created in Japan in 1986. It has been steadily updated and marketed around the world, and currently has over 200,000 active users worldwide. The English version of Shade 3D has been available since the early 2000s, and a new English release is due out in the near future.
Shade 3D now offers a 3D Printing Assistant, which checks and repairs meshes, allowing for seamless printing of 3D objects. For game creation, Shade 3D for Unity was recently released to create scenes and props within the Unity game development workflow.
The development and engineering team at Shade3D Co., Ltd. has a long history with the software. Director Sunny Wong has been working with Shade 3D since 1997. He had been director of CG development, director of engineering, and director of Shade 3D development at E-Frontier. The new CEO of the company is Masanao Sasabuchi, who had been with E-Frontier, Japan, for almost nine years.
"We are very excited about our new company and the opportunity to build upon Shade’s great legacy,” says Masanao Sasabuchi. There is a large global market for dependable and affordable 3D software that artists and studios can use in 3D printing, gaming, architecture, animation, design and video. Our new English version of Shade will have solid, innovative features and is just the beginning of what we have planned for the future.”