An open source carrara
halimfady
Posts: 0
I hate to see carrara without a major release for almost ten years. One way to keep it alive is to open source it and make available on githup or gitlab. If Daz 3D still wants to make money out of it they can provide a premium version with extra features .
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
This has been suggested before https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/188011/a-plea-for-open-source-carrara
Making something open source is not free - an open source Carrara would require the code prepared, to make sure that the libraries used were compatible with the open source license being considered and to make sure there was no proprietary information there for example, and the open source license would need careful preparation by lawyers.
Nor is making something open source a potion of immortality - who would choose to work on ten year old code rather than devoting their efforts to Blender, which has a long history in open soruce and has been actively developed? There isn't a great flood of new plug-ins being released, so it doesn't look as if there is a large group of people with development skills and interest in Carrara.
This is a very negative argument. First , Carrara is a good app and it will attract many user and many developers if made available as open source. Second , the while many open source projects fail some succeed. It depends on having a smart foundation behind it. Funding could come from users or differnt organiztions. Third, it does not have to compete with blender at the begining it will have its own target users , blender itself was not very popular or useful at the beginning .
It is unclear how much money daz 3d makes from selling carrara licenses anyway, and I do not think opensourcing it will be profitable for it either. Forks may be started that daz have no control over for example. However, daz shoud not lock its development either . If they can not releasee a major upgrade they should donate it to its fans then, and I am sure they will take from there. In brief opensourcing Carrara may be more useful to the users than to daz 3d .
All of that is just a hope - we don't know how many, if any, developers will be prepared to take on Carrara. You are also ignoring the fact that making Carrara open source, if it is possible (parts are certainly licensed libraries, which may not have a direct open source equivalent), will actually cost Daz money. You are welcome to think it might be a viable route forward, but ultimately it is not our decision - and as I pointed out in the previous post it is not a new idea, so it seems unlikely that it will be any more likely to be adopted now. If you want Carrara features in an open source application it would probably be more practical to try to get them added to Blender, or to fork Blender into a more Carrara-like version (remembering that the license does not alow reverse engineering).
Thanks a lot Mr Haseltine.
Can some of the code be made open source, if not all of it?
There is the SDK
Richard,
With the Current lack of general Interest that DAZ has shown for Carrara, it seems that Licensed libraries are making no profits for anyone. I have owned versions of this software since Ray Dream, if you are pushing those of us who love Carrara to try Blender, then you have given up.
The Better way to approach Carrara is to get one of the DAZ programmers off their duff, and impliment AI assistance to Carrara.
You guys are after profits, so make it profitable.
Don't just lay down and force it to die.
It is not my decision to make, but I have to point out that the small number of Daz application devel;opers are working flat out already - so this would require pullling people off their current projects, require them to learn code writen by an entirely separate team, and then require them to spend time working on a feature for which there is an extremely uncertain demand.
I know this is not your fault, or decision, but perhaps it can be forwarded to decision makers.
The uncertian demand has been caused by the lack of updates and lack of interaction with their customers. I have watched many Carrara users and plug-in developers move on because of this.
I have been a Public Works Director for 26 years, and know that a little empathy, and understanding go a long way.
With the advent of AI, now would be the time for them to jump in and create a new and improved persona For Carrara...........Just look what the original developers did from scratch, and I was able to actually have a phone conversation with "them".
The demand for 3D AI is there, and is in it's infancy .... look at Deepmotion for instance.....
An easy to use full 3D suite with AI assistance would be a game changer, It is not out there...yet.
" ... spend time working on a feature for which there is an extremely uncertain demand ... " Indeed, if I were making decisions at DAZ, I would not go this route. Carrara is just like that old part for a 1967 Camaro that will never be in demand again, sitting on a dusty shelf in the back of the Auto Parts store (except the restored Camaros get 50 grand these days). I have tried Lightwave, Blender, Daz Studio, Poser, Bryce, VUE. And I use Carrara on a daily basis.
And I loved my '67 Camaro.
It is likely that Carrara will no longer survive. At least not in the form we know. It could perhaps be partially integrated into Dazstudio. That's at least a small hope. Too many users have left now. Which you can also see here in the forum. Unfortunately, things are looking bleak. The fact that Carrara doesn't run properly on newer Mac OS and no effort at all is made to at least fix the problem simply shows that you don't want to use even more energy.
It's just a shame - you can still create great dinners. Once the users have migrated to another software, whatever it is called, they are also lost for Daz (Studio). But that's just my personal opinion. The text is only translated with Google so please don't take the words lightly. :)
I hope that it continues for a while and that a real perspective somehow emerges.
in my opinion would be better working on things like that before Daz turns off the light upon carrara:
https://www.cgchannel.com/2023/04/lightwave-to-get-new-owner/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lightwavesalvation?locale=en_GB
I don't get the pessimism here. Surely Daz are doing a great job by keeping Carrara still open to purchase instead of removing Carrara from purchase..? The perpetual offline licensing is just fantastic, and Carrara is one of the very few remaining with that model. Thanks Daz and also for keeping Bryce. The only other software choice you have which resembles this great attitude is Lightwave. Obviously Blender and tiny little anin8or are free so there is also that. Poser has fallen because a permanent license is required to be tethered online otherwise you will be disconnected from your own purchase..
As such, modern software is something of a paper tiger when one considers the reality of subscription only, or worse paying for every time you open your software, example Autodesk Flex. https://www.autodesk.com/buying/flex?term=1-YEAR&tab=flex ; Horrifying. Really nice to know Carrara is still hanging in there in the face of all that... :)
I think it's the dwindling user base more than anything
unless it's just dwindling forum users which seems unlikely
I myself cannot find anything to replace it as much as I would like to use Blender it just doesn't gel with me the same as Carrara.
DAZ studio is too restrictive, it's awesome for using DAZ content not so much for anything else
especially FBX
and it's only a content loader and renderer not a modeler
everything else I can do in Carrara needs a paid addon or script
Hopefully Windows will operate Carrara for generations to come as I will need to update my computer in a couple of years time, if not I have already made moves towards Silo/Milo, 3DCoat, and Blender. This is due to lack of support by DAZ towards Carrara.
Would love to see Carrara 9 and would pay full price for it !!!
The fact that there are fewer and fewer users can be observed recently.
try a lot of other software Mac users are left completely out in the cold. Due to the switch from Quicktime to Metal, new operating systems can no longer be used properly. This means that even fast computers only have emulation programs.
But the fact that import modules were simply not completed from the beginning or that they were forgotten to add them was also a bit stupid. It only works with the trick of installing version 8 and then reloading the corresponding missing elements.
If something were to happen in these areas, some Mac users would certainly be there again. But all the complaining is of no use if daz isn't interested in retaining the users then there's nothing you can do about it. Hope dies last.
A very nice idea, discussed many times, but DAZ3D never joined the discussion of what are the possibilities and restrictions regarding that.
Probably the most likely thing could be if a company bought Carrara and became it's new parents and developers. But who would do that? Carrara never had such presence as Lihgtwave 3D had in CG industry and apparently the fan group is very small nowadays, most moved on to Blender, Modo etc. Many times I wished to win a lottery and be able to buy rights to Carrara, while I keep dreaming, question is, where to go then? How to proceed? People who are still into Carrara, even though it is a dead horse due to lack of development, are DAZ 3D content users mostly. If ownership changed, would DAZ 3D content be still supported the way it was? Should alternative collections be started? Should the new owners concentrate on actually bringing Carrara up to powertools like Blender 3D etc.? Industry changed quite a bit since the last active development days.
Hopefully Carrara will get resurrected, Prayers that a new good owner would come.
Diffeomorphic works on most things I've tried to export.
I remember being reasonably happy with Carrara and Hexagon about a dozen years ago, but I haven't worked with either of them since -- despite my desire for something less time-demanding than Blender -- because I hit bugs or missing needed upgrades and it was already evident that Daz wasn't going to fix the bugs or maintain compatibility with future figures. So I gave up on both. I too suggested open-sourcing because I thought either could make a good 3D introductory package. Hexagon's rather elegant that way. A pity if it's not feasible.
I know about Bforartists but I haven't been following it. I looked at it briefly, but I didn't seriously try it for one reason: the tutorials all the rest of the world produces are for standard Blender. And "I know _______ must exist, but where the bleep is it?" is one of the significant obstacles to learning Blender. I couldn't see how to follow the standard Blender tutorials and Bforartists at the same time.
It took me about five tries to get into 3D modelling seriously, not because I considered it incomprehensible -- I had plenty of background for it -- but because every time I got more-or-less used to some piece of software, either it disappeared, or -- in the case of Blender -- it changed seriously enough while real-life disruption kept me away, that the answer to Where the Bleep is Function X, and How Do I Invoke It? changed enough, by the time I got back, that I usually nearly ended up starting over.
Blender's changing rapidly right now, and probably will be for a while ... and it needs to, so I'm not complaining about that. But that makes it a trying choice for someone who's trying to get into 3D modelling with no background at all.
Bforartists has a non-trivial number of people keeping up with standard Blender releases. What they (unsurprisingly) don't have, is an equivalent number of people making tutorials for people getting up to speed with Bforartists.
Carrara was never half as complicated as Blender, as I remember it. To make a Carraraesque face for Blender that stayed reasonably stable on the front end doesn't seem as if it should be impossible. However, a project like this would need enough coders to keep up with Blender's rapid changes on the back end. Also at least one person who writes comprehensible documentation.
"despite my desire for something less time-demanding than Blender"
Indeed. A favorite vendor of great environments sometime back switched from VUE to Blender, I'm guessing because VUE went subscription and Blender is free. I tried to adapt to Blender but found it more user hostile than VUE and way more hostile than Carrara. I am not a modeler and use such environments for animations. So ... in a pinch I wll load his Blender product and try to generate some backgounds, but more happily use some of his older VUE products and animate the camera (if you have a high end machine) An example, the VUE animation starts at ~0.38:
Yeah, 'hostile' is a good description of Blender. It's definitely improving, in the sense that the devs (remarkably enough) decided to move it closer to convention. And I'm definitely not saying that I dislike it -- I'm getting on with it reasonably well -- only that it does not now, and probably never will, fill the niche of Comparatively Easy-to-Learn 3D Modelling App the Hobbyist Can Work With Without Marrying.
If we can't have Hexagon or Carrara ... what does fill that niche?
Nothing that I've seen (while clinging to Carrara on a strong machine I hope will last some years).