Hi Chikako,

i would like to see a project based Shade book, from a Shade Master. Whether from Jürgen or one in Japan, were most of all aspects of Shade are covered, like modeling, animating and rendering.

Best regards
Stefan

After a lot of experimenting with Hair Salon I concluded it is in need of much deeper documentation. The current docs give some examples of usage but miss an explanation of the concepts (like when use hair or fur mode etc) and most buttons/controls aren't explained at all.

One gets to good results after playing around but many things are guesswork: How many hairs do I get per guide? What does max hair do? How does colouring work? Can I change the material properties of hair (i.e. to make it more shiny)? What advantage has Hair over Fur?

I plan to write a tutorial on my findings but many things I simply can't answer because of the guessing

For general format I would say it would be nice to get an explanation of the concepts and ideas behind a feature and then the usage on one or more examples. The manual doesn't have to explain any detail, as long as the in app reference gets the details for all controls.

Very good idea.
I agree with stefan, I would like to see a walk through guide of the basics ie UI intro, modeling, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation, exporting/rendering like the bear example but better detailed.
Focusing on the most commonly used tools .
Also, the 2 column layout is great for a broucher, but hard to read as a manual, still a good resource tho.

Cover UV mapping more in depth, especially LSCM. Searching for "LSCM" in shade camp results in: "There were no results matching the query." Right now I do a lot of box UVs and then piece them together. Very time consuming, but delivers the best results thus far.

Most of all, character animation. Rig, skin, and animate a character. The manuals all have basic animation for moving whole parts, but nothing on something as detailed as fingers and such. Facial animation would be great too!

I think some simple explanations, with examples of the different rendering settings and GI would be really useful, as they could help us to know which ones are better to use to reduce rendering times or improve quality.