AutoShade

AutoShade is an early 3D rendering package used in conjunction with AutoCAD developed by Autodesk in 1987.

Description

AutoShade was an MS DOS application developed by Autodesk to produce realistic shaded renderings of AutoCAD Drawings using 3D Faces. It simulated various types of lights such as Spot, Point and Infinite Directional. To create a rendering you first had to create an AutoCAD Drawing file containing 3D faces. The Next step is placing lights and cameras in the drawing (as blocks, supplied with the AutoShade package for use in AutoCAD). Then, running an AutoLISP application provided by AutoShade, the 3D faces, Camera blocks and lighting blocks were saved out to a "Scene" file. This "Scene" file is then opened from within AutoShade and contains all the information needed to render the image.

Files

The finished image rendering was output was to an .RND file. In the earlier versions this was a 2D vector based data file that could be imported into applications such as Adobe Illustrator version 4. Later as Gouraud shading was added this file could also be a raster file.

There was an application developed called FLIMAKER.EXE for MS DOS that converted .RND files into a format usable in Autodesk Animator. This could be used in conjunction with AutoFlix to create rudimentary 3D animations from within AutoCAD.

Demise

Although the final version of AutoShade supported Renderman extensions it was never developed as full rendering application. Even with AutoFlix there was no support for keyframing or hierarchal kinematics so when Autodesk released 3D Studio it effectively ended the need for AutoShade, as 3D Studio was a far superior application both in technology and in ease of use.

External links

* [http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/subsectionstar2_68_0_6.html Fourmilab Autofile]