Carrara Family Tree - History Chart by Antoine Clappier

Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2990 Location: Inglewood CA

Hi, Antoine Clappier former CEO of Eovia posted a history of Carrara and so I am reposting it here.

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Hi all!

I have seen a few posts lately about the Carrara history. As I have
been involved since a little while with the Ray Dream / Carrara
development, I can give a few dates about these products.

The history of Carrara Studio starts in 1989! At that time a group of
friends coming from France moved to California with the idea of
creating a graphic software using the new Macs with color display (a
pretty vague plan!). Two years later they released the first version
of Ray Dream.

After growing their company successfully, they sold Ray Dream Inc. to
Fractal Design (developer of Painter) in 1996. About the same time, I
founded RAYflect a company developing plug-ins for Ray Dream,
Photoshop and MAX.

A year later, Fractal Design was in turn acquired by MetaTools
(Bryce, the KPTs). The combination of the two companies became
MetaCreations. Meanwhile MetaTools acquired Specular, the maker of
Infini-D.

MetaCreations having two similar products (Ray Dream and Infini-D)
decided to merge the two products and to create Carrara. In 1999,
MetaCreations acquired my company and I became in charge of Ray
Dream, Infini-D and Carrara (and moved from France to California)

Follows the "MetaCreations disaster". To save Carrara, I founded
Eovia in 2000 with Arnaud Berry, Charles Brissart and Alexandre
Clappier. Since then Eovia has released three versions of Carrara
Studio.

Want even more details? Read below the one and only complete Carrara
history (gathered during the last 10 years!):

1989, Dec: Eric Hautemont et al. found Ray Dream, Inc

1991: Ray Dream ships Ray Dream Designer 1

1991: Adam Lavine founds Specular International (maker of Infini-D).

1991-93: Ray Dream ships Ray Dream Designer 2 (unknown date!)

1994, Jan.: Ray Dream ships Ray Dream Designer 3

1995, Q4: Ray Dream releases Ray Dream Studio 4

1996, May: Ray Dream, Inc merges with Fractal Design Corp.

1997: April: MetaTools, Inc acquires Specular International.

1997, Feb: MetaTools, Inc merges with Fractal Design Corp.

1997, May: MetaTools/Fractal Design becomes MetaCreations Corp.

1997, June: Antoine Clappier et al. found RAYflect

1997, June: MetaCreations ships Infini-D 4.0

1997, July: MetaCreations ships Ray Dream Studio 5

1997, September: MetaCreations ships Ray Dream 3D

1998, May: MetaCreations ships Infini-D 4.5

1999, June: MetaCreation acquires RAYflect, ships Ray Dream Studio 5.5

1999, December: MetaCreation ships Carrara 1.0

1999, 2000 : MetaCreation sells its graphic software:
- Poser goes to Curious Labs
- Painter, the KPTs, Bryce go to Corel
- Canoma goes to Adobe

2000, Nov: Eovia Corp is founded. Eovia acquires Carrara

2001, Jan: TGS announces the acquisition of Eovia Corp.

2001, March: Eovia ships Amapi 3D V6.

2001, June: Eovia ships Carrara Studio 1.1

2002, June: Eovia ships Carrara Studio 2.0

2002, Aug: Eovia ships VectorStyle

2002, Nov: Eovia ships Carrara 3D Basics

2003, March: Eovia ships Power Pack

2003, March: Eovia ships Amapi Designer 7

2003, Sept: Eovia ships Carrara Studio 3.0

UPDATE:

2003, Dec: e-frontier acquires Curious Labs maker of Poser

2004, April: TGS (owner of Eovia Corp.) is acquired by Mercury
Computer Systems. I leave the company. Eovia Corp. is spun-off.

2004, Sept: Eovia ships Carrara 4 and Carrara 4 Pro

2005, May: Eovia ships Hexagon

2005, Oct: Eovia ships Carrara 5 and Carrara 5 Pro

2006, Apr: DAZ acquires Eovia Corp. Ships Hexagon 2

2006, June: e-frontier acquires Amapi Pro / Eovia Europe (not official)?

Antoine Clappier
President
---------------------------
www.oloneo.com
Oloneo SAS
5, rue Lyautey
75016 - Paris

Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 144

Poor thing. She has been passed around like a bad date. Wink

Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2990 Location: Inglewood CA

During the RayDream Studio days it had over 200,000 users. It was at one time the most popular 3d application.

steama wrote:

Poor thing. She has been passed around like a bad date. Wink

Posted:Fri Oct 13, 2006 2:49 pm

RingoM wrote:

During the RayDream Studio days it had over 200,000 users. It was at one time the most popular 3d application. ...

And it wasn't cheap! I remember when I saw it for $100 in a computer flea market (around the time of the switch to Carrara_1) I thought, "WOW, what a bargain". If I remember right the retail cost was 5 or 6 hundred dollars in '99 or 2000.

Raydream had what I thought was a handy way to implement motion paths (cameras, planets, etc.) It would take your initial specification and then plot out the path and put a dot in the position of the object for each frame of your animation. You got to see the whole motion path and the position of the moving object at any point in the animation. You could then go to a particular position and tweak it No guessing, no figureing percent of travel path, you knew where the object would be at each frame. Very handy for setting up collisions or threading a needle. Cool

Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 144

RingoM wrote:

During the RayDream Studio days it had over 200,000 users. It was at one time the most popular 3d application.

Indeed! RayDream was one very popular application. I sure would like to see those days return to Carrara. Maybe in the hands of DAZ? Smile

Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 2810 Location: Antwerp (Belgium)

I bought ray dream designer 4, cos it was one of the 3D programs i could affort, then i upgraded to ray dream studio 5.5, it wasnt expensive AND iwas reall really in love with the shader tree. It was the only program i actually understood the principal of making materials.

Then i didnt have the time anymore for a long time, and now i mmust relearn everything, including the changed "texture room". I feel really a noob here.

But that will change since i am going to spend more time. (Guess i am still in love :p)

Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 315 Location: Pa

steama wrote:

RingoM wrote:

During the RayDream Studio days it had over 200,000 users. It was at one time the most popular 3d application.

Indeed! RayDream was one very popular application. I sure would like to see those days return to Carrara. Maybe in the hands of DAZ? Smile

Me Too. I go back a long way with this program. It was the first serious 3D program that I began using back in 1994 and 1995 and I stayed with it until 5.5. Now I have Carrara and I too hope to see good things happen with the program. Has anyone got the inside scoop on what Daz's plans are?

Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2990 Location: Inglewood CA

The inside scope is DAZ continues to develop Carrara under the leadership of Charles Brissart same as under Eovia.

ephotosaver wrote:

Me Too. I go back a long way with this program. It was the first serious 3D program that I began using back in 1994 and 1995 and I stayed with it until 5.5. Now I have Carrara and I too hope to see good things happen with the program. Has anyone got the inside scoop on what Daz's plans are?

Joined: 30 May 2005 Posts: 537 Location: Huddersfield, UK

Unlike most of you chaps, I came over from the Infini-D camp, which I thought was also a great app.
With each successive upgrade the user gets REAL added value to their application, unlike many I can think of (being in the graphics industry for years and having to buy upgrades with features you neither need nor want, and often just fixing their bugs which, by the way they never tell you about).
It has come a long way since it's first incarnation and is truly a joy to use and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone.

Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 315 Location: Pa

uvavoo wrote:

Unlike most of you chaps, I came over from the Infini-D camp, which I thought was also a great app.
With each successive upgrade the user gets REAL added value to their application, unlike many I can think of (being in the graphics industry for years and having to buy upgrades with features you neither need nor want, and often just fixing their bugs which, by the way they never tell you about).
It has come a long way since it's first incarnation and is truly a joy to use and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone.

Back then I always wanted the Infini-D then they stopped making it.

Joined: 01 May 2006 Posts: 877 Location: Australia

ephotosaver wrote:

uvavoo wrote:

Unlike most of you chaps, I came over from the Infini-D camp, which I thought was also a great app.
With each successive upgrade the user gets REAL added value to their application, unlike many I can think of (being in the graphics industry for years and having to buy upgrades with features you neither need nor want, and often just fixing their bugs which, by the way they never tell you about).
It has come a long way since it's first incarnation and is truly a joy to use and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone.

Back then I always wanted the Infini-D then they stopped making it.

I came over from Infini-D too. It wasn't really discontinued until Metacreations released Carrara 1.0. Carrara, while generally understood to be the sucessor of RayDream also contained code from Infini-D which to this day can still be glimpsed as those frustrating previews in the particle editor.

Joined: 28 Sep 2006 Posts: 8333

Hopefully there will be a May/June/July entry added for either C5.5 or C6 Smile

and it will then support any number and variety of CR2 as well as have a content and finder tab similar to DS that will function natively with all of .dsb and other DS files that make workflow in DS so much better than Poser Smile

Oh and maybe it will have an option for the DS toon renderer with network support (I like it better than the !Toon Pro renderer).

Joined: 28 Feb 2004 Posts: 48 Location: Palm Harbor, FL

Yup,

I remember coming through the first version of Poser (How great I thought that was … clunks et al.) I too was an Infini-D fan along with Bryce (from v. 1 all the way 'til v.5). Also, upgrading through versions of KPT, which I found were the best 3rd party plug-ins for Photoshop.

Remember the days of standard 8 MB of RAM emulated to 16MB with RAM Doubler. A GB of RAM was unimaginable, now we're up to 16GB. (BTW, thanks for reminding me of the Particle room, the last trace of Infini-D)

Digital design certainly has come a long way over the past few years. I'm anxious to see what can be done with all the RAM that's available now … how programmers/developers will be taking advantage of that (Apple's Leopard OS may hint towards something).

C5Pro I thought was a great upgrade, I hope C6 will be even more remarkable … there's some phenomenal stuff out there from the competition. Thanks for the trip down memory lane … Best regards to one and all. Smile

Joined: 28 Sep 2006 Posts: 8333

*appreciates nostalgia*

DAZ Software QA Team Joined: 16 Aug 2006 Posts: 444

For me, the interest in 3d started with a little thing called the "Amiga Juggler Demo." I would see it in stores all the time, mind you I lived in Germany from 1986 to 1990. A German skater that I knew got an Amiga 500 and after seeing that computer, my Commodore 128D just didn't cut it. I picked up an Amiga 500 myself and toyed around with Sculpt 3D.

In 1993 I upgraded to an Amiga 4000/060. At first I had the standard 2MB of Chip RAM and no additional Free RAM; despite not having virtual memory, the Amiga didn't need more than that. Soon I picked up a copy of Tornado 3D (from Italy). That was a much better 3D package than Sculpt 3D. Around that time Bryce came out. Though I had long been using Vista Pro (a fractal terrain generator) I thought that Bryce produced much more interesting results. Of course, there was no Amiga version. So I bought an Emplant card and plugged it into my Amiga which effectively made my Amiga the equivalent of a Mac Quadra 900. I picked up Bryce and Photoshop and was very happy that they both worked flawlessly (though, in the end I added about 40MB of RAM because Macs were such memory hogs). Amiga computers can multi-task like nothing else and I would often launch the Mac emulator and start rendering a Bryce scene, then switch back to the Amiga and do some Modeling in Tornado 3D. When I wanted to know how far along the Bryce render was, I'd just drag the Amiga screen down to see the Mac screen behind it. Sigh, those were the days, when a powerful near RTOS, multi-tasking, GUI based OS could fit on a single 3.5" 880K Floppy disk.

Now that's some nostalgia. I still have my A4000/060 too. Makes me want to start using it again!

Craig

Joined: 28 Sep 2006 Posts: 8333

DAZ_Craig wrote:

For me, the interest in 3d started with a little thing called the "Amiga Juggler Demo." I would see it in stores all the time, mind you I lived in Germany from 1986 to 1990. A German skater that I knew got an Amiga 500 and after seeing that computer, my Commodore 128D just didn't cut it. I picked up an Amiga 500 myself and toyed around with Sculpt 3D.

In 1993 I upgraded to an Amiga 4000/060. At first I had the standard 2MB of Chip RAM and no additional Free RAM; despite not having virtual memory, the Amiga didn't need more than that. Soon I picked up a copy of Tornado 3D (from Italy). That was a much better 3D package than Sculpt 3D. Around that time Bryce came out. Though I had long been using Vista Pro (a fractal terrain generator) I thought that Bryce produced much more interesting results. Of course, there was no Amiga version. So I bought an Emplant card and plugged it into my Amiga which effectively made my Amiga the equivalent of a Mac Quadra 900. I picked up Bryce and Photoshop and was very happy that they both worked flawlessly (though, in the end I added about 40MB of RAM because Macs were such memory hogs). Amiga computers can multi-task like nothing else and I would often launch the Mac emulator and start rendering a Bryce scene, then switch back to the Amiga and do some Modeling in Tornado 3D. When I wanted to know how far along the Bryce render was, I'd just drag the Amiga screen down to see the Mac screen behind it. Sigh, those were the days, when a powerful near RTOS, multi-tasking, GUI based OS could fit on a single 3.5" 880K Floppy disk.

Now that's some nostalgia. I still have my A4000/060 too. Makes me want to start using it again!

Craig

Mac emulator card? They should still make those (for PC)!!!

Though, I honestly couldn't imaging learning 3d on earlier systems, in 1998 I tried learning lightwave on a Video Toaster (an Amiga... not sure what model) and with 42 minute classes... it just wasn't happening, renders took more time than I had for class, even for simple stuff Sad

Though this slowness might be attributed to the fact that lightwave ran through Video Toaster (which was pretty fast considering it's age)

Joined: 15 Aug 2004 Posts: 21

YES. OLD GOOD TIMES. RAYDREAM 5.5 WAS A MILESTONE: IT DOESN'T NEEDS MORE TO CREATE EVRYRTHING IN THE SPLINE MODELER. ANYBODY BILIEVE THAT THE SPLINE MODELER WAS THE ONLY MODELER AROUND, BEFORE RAYDREAM 5? AND THERE WERE ARTISTS WHO CREATED GREAT ART WITH RAYDREAM USING ONLY THE SPLINE MODELER. WHERE ARE THOSE GUYS TODAY? I DON"T KNOW...

Posted:Mon Jul 09, 2007 6:30 pm

And you are shouting this why?

Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2990 Location: Inglewood CA

Hi Craig.

If I remember correctly the Author of the original Vertex Modeler for RayDream Studio is the one that author Sculpt3D for the Amiga.

By the way I come from the other side of the family the ATARI ST system. The ATARI STs came from the Jack Trammel founder of commodore computers. I started my 3D and animation journey in Lexicor Software Chronos3D keyframe animator for the ST,TT computers.

I than moved into RayDream Designer, RayDream Studio, Poser and Bryce....the rest is history.

DAZ_Craig wrote:

For me, the interest in 3d started with a little thing called the "Amiga Juggler Demo." I would see it in stores all the time, mind you I lived in Germany from 1986 to 1990. A German skater that I knew got an Amiga 500 and after seeing that computer, my Commodore 128D just didn't cut it. I picked up an Amiga 500 myself and toyed around with Sculpt 3D.

In 1993 I upgraded to an Amiga 4000/060. At first I had the standard 2MB of Chip RAM and no additional Free RAM; despite not having virtual memory, the Amiga didn't need more than that. Soon I picked up a copy of Tornado 3D (from Italy). That was a much better 3D package than Sculpt 3D. Around that time Bryce came out. Though I had long been using Vista Pro (a fractal terrain generator) I thought that Bryce produced much more interesting results. Of course, there was no Amiga version. So I bought an Emplant card and plugged it into my Amiga which effectively made my Amiga the equivalent of a Mac Quadra 900. I picked up Bryce and Photoshop and was very happy that they both worked flawlessly (though, in the end I added about 40MB of RAM because Macs were such memory hogs). Amiga computers can multi-task like nothing else and I would often launch the Mac emulator and start rendering a Bryce scene, then switch back to the Amiga and do some Modeling in Tornado 3D. When I wanted to know how far along the Bryce render was, I'd just drag the Amiga screen down to see the Mac screen behind it. Sigh, those were the days, when a powerful near RTOS, multi-tasking, GUI based OS could fit on a single 3.5" 880K Floppy disk.

Now that's some nostalgia. I still have my A4000/060 too. Makes me want to start using it again!

Craig

Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 178 Location: Trenton, NJ USA

Well i have only poked around with 3d graphics since seeing pov-ray in action and bought Ray Dream Designer. I loved the program and make a few cool things in it then drop out of graphics for a while. In fact I still have it complete with the manual/book. I got Carrara 1 free from a magazine disc, and now C5 from the last big sale. Hex2 is cool as well. Lately I have been getting more and more into graphics and I can put all this software to some good use for a change Smile

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