A Plea for Open-Source Carrara
Inkubo
Posts: 745
From what I can observe, DAZ makes money by selling content, and as you the buyer follow the EULA, they don't care what programs you may use to create 2D artwork from that content: DAZ Studio, Carrara, Bryce, or an array of programs from other vendors.
Apparently DAZ Studio (DS) works well enough that there is no way DAZ can really monetize and support development of Hexagon, Bryce, and Carrara. Each of those programs has its fans, but in each case the user base isn't growing fast enough to pay for new development resources.
I believe it's a shame that Carrara languishes, because it has a rendering engine that IMO looks as good as 3Delight for still images and can be configured to render animation much more quickly than DS (minutes or hours instead of days), plus it has animation and content-creation tools that DS can't even dream of.
I'd like to ask that DAZ consider whether they would really stand to lose control of any valuable IP if they open-sourced Carrara so the fans could tinker with it to fix the bugs, improve save and load times, and make it compatible with current-generation unencrypted content.
I've tried to imagine why DAZ might not want to do this, and here are my thoughts about the reasons I can come up with.
- We don't want to waste our resources managing an open-source project. I think if you give us a way to get the code and a whitepaper telling us how to build it, plus a new folder for Carrara Developers inside the Carrara discussion forum, you might be able to just leave it at that. State explicitly that you offer no support for Carrara development.
- We don't want people to see the code and talk trash about it. Well, this is code from the 90's, surely full of bad 90's ideas and fashions like Hungarian notation. State up front that whipping it into modern, well-structured code is part of the Carrara Developer Challenge.
- We can't tell anyone, but we're secretly porting all Carrara's good stuff to DAZ Studio. By all means, please do! But still, would you really lose anything if your Carrara customers were able to tweak and modernize Carrara itself? If you're going to use Carrara's IP in a program you give away for free, would it really hurt to let fans have a crack at improving it and possibly give you innovations you could port back to DS? You get to pick the license terms, so make the ability to use improvements in closed-source DS one of the terms.
- We don't want people to have a look at our code and use that to improve methods to use our unencrypted content in to Blender or iClone or... Why not? Wouldn't this open up more avenues and a wider audience for selling DAZ content?
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Comments
I am not sure that an open source version would be made as it is a commercial product.
You missed at least one obvious possibility: "the application contaisn proprietary, licensed code which we would not be able to make open-source."
True as that is why I doubt it will happen. Also I think you misspelled contains.
trying to spell contagean?
Contaisn. It's a thing. Now. And a flavour: Raisin Contaisin Contagean from Jen & Berry . . . .
If there are no typos in one of my posts you should suspect it's from an interloper.
Well I can't see any typos in that one, which means it's not you. But if it isn't you then the rule doesn't apply, so it could be you .....
micro ferret typing detected
Ugh. That's a biggie. I did assume DAZ owned all of it. If the licensed part is a UI toolkit like QT or something, that could be replaced, but if it's the rendering engine, my idea is toast.
QT itself is Open Source, so that's not an issue. And even if the render engine used is someone's IP, most have development kits that you can use to continue using it; this would, of course, determine what Open Source License could be used for the release, as not all of them permit linking to a closed source library.
Greetings,
Carrara likely has networking code, rendering engine, a build system, various image processing algorithms, 3D transformation libraries, file I/O and serialization/deserialization code, just as an example, all of which can be, or contain, references to commercial libraries that THEY have a license for, because they paid for it, but that they can't distribute. If you're sane, you don't write all of a package like that yourself, you get 90% of it as third party libraries and the part that is key..that has your imprimatur on it...is the part that brings it all together and makes magic.
I've been down this path all too often with commercial projects; you just can't open them up, because most of the things that actually make it _work_ aren't yours.
Worse, given Carrara's hand-me-down history from RayDream forward, it very likely has IP from companies that licensed its use specifically for that product when selling the ownership to DAZ, but that DAZ doesn't have the rights to relicense in an open source form. For instance, Fractal Design, one of the creators of Poser, probably had IP that is shared between Poser and Carrara in there. It may even still be used in Poser, which would make it especially verboten to release. DAZ probably has a license to use and sell products that use it, because they acquired it with the software, but not a license to give it away in source form.
I too have wished, very much, that commercial projects could be open sourced, so they don't have to die a silent death while people still want to use and extend them. I've cried real tears when commercial projects have had to close up and disappear when their author gives up on it, or worse..dies. But it's not really possible, with all the libraries and licenses that commercial projects acquire. Don't presume poor faith with things like encryption, trash talking code, wasting resources, etc... It's far more likely that the reason is simpler, sadder, and vastly more unbendable than any of those.
-- Morgan
p.s. This is probably the most depressing post I've written in a bit; I'd love to be wrong, but I hold out little hope.
I often wonder how many of those issues might also be blocking development of software like that.
I once did QA on a game that had changed hands, and the documentation on it was _literally_ gleaned from fan sites. They had no surviving internal documentation at all.
And even if it was available to make as open-source...
I do quite a bit of C++ programming, and just the thought of taking such an old piece of software that probably hasn't been touched in many years, may not have much in the way of detailed documentation that an outsider could pick up and really understand the code, may not have significant internal comments to explain what the code is doing, probably doesn't have anyone around who can answer questions about it, may not have a nice object-oriented architecture, and so on...
Wow. Gives me a headache just thinking about it. If I was a developer with time to spare and donate to a cause, and looking for a fun project where I could do some cool stuff right off the bat, I'd probably run to Blender or something like that which is actively developed and has a big community behind it. Compared to scratching my head for weeks/months/years figuring out the code and trying to bring into the 21st century? Yeah, I don't think so. I'd much rather jump to Blender and make a GoB plugin for D|S to Blender.....
Actually given what they did to Carrara with regards to updates four years ago means the software probably is in good shape. It might not work good on my computer (2000+ DAZ products too much for it?) but I can see it is mostly top flight. Those that speculating that Carrara has licensed a bunch of 3rd party source code and libraries: are they that sure that is actually the case? If Carrara were just a glue job then it'd be even easier to keep updated because there would be much less they could update and the licensors would be doing the the lion's share of updates anyway.
This thread is speculation so I'll have a go at it, if DAZ 3D doesn't make an update to Carrara or an integration of it into DAZ Studio in the 2nd half of the year I'd consider Carrara done for, especially given the 59% enhanced sales of the Genesis 8 Victoria 8 compared to the Genesis 3 Victoria 7. The tools DAZ 3D have are on the cusp to being what hobby animators and game makers would like to have and be a good permanent advertising presence everytime those hobbyists make an animation or game to sell new art content for those tools and their hobby but DAZ 3D has the sales data. If these forums and forums elsewhere are a good indicator definately DAZ 3D, Morph 3D, and Poser as well as Fuse have seen huge increases of hobbyist/moonlighter customers using and buying content for those products. Sorry, those that have been with these products for 10 and 20 years doing graphic novels, comics, and art still commissions, but that is where the market growth is and anyway it's not like any of those products will loose those capabilities that could do that to begin with. Blender is fast becoming easier and more capable so there is room for competiton but Blender doesn't have the massive libraries of premade content at affordable prices.
I've only used Carrara on and off over the years (mostly off...) so I'm not really knowledgeable about it. But it raises the question:
What does Carrara have that anyone really wants? Does it have any of the latest technology? I'm sure I'll get beaten and flogged for even suggesting it, but is there something you can't do in D|S that Carrara is really good at? I never liked the modelling in Carrara (one reason why I used Blender), and I don't think you can even use the G3's in Carrara (which is a big deal for me because I'm a big fan of how much better they are than the old V4's or whatever it was). And all the new content is around Iray and G3's, and now G8's. And I LOVE Iray.
And as far as the condition of the Carrara code, I have no idea. I just assume that with the focus on D|S in the last many years, any work on Carrara was a "hey, we need to dig out Carrara and update it for the new character version, but dont' spend too much time on it because we need to add more cool stuff to D|S". I dunno, has it been 10 years or something since they had people at DAZ who were Carrara developers?
They gave a long list of what was updated 4 years ago. They had to do major changes to get it working. The changes would have given the programmers experience in the same type of changes that are needed now again. And all the experienced users of Carrara and DAZ Studio animate2/keyMate/graphMate are in general agreement that Carrara is much better at animating then the DAZ Studio combo. So there you have it - Carrara is liked for being easier to animate in, which is nothing to turn your nose up at even if you are just going to export those animations to a game engine which is the objective of some Carrara users. Likewise some Carrara users model in Carrara strictly to export the results to game engines.
As far as liking modeling in Blender better, well I do too but I am familar more with Blender, some others that have tried both prefer Carrara.
I prefer Carrara's UI for modeling far more than everything else I've tried.
It could use a few more tools, but overall? I love it.
And, for working on morphs for DS, G3 and G8 work fine.
Oh, okay. Can't argue with that. I can count the times I animated anything in Carrara on the fingers of one...well, finger. So I have no clue how it compares to D|S.
Maybe that's why D|S is poor at animating...maybe there's not a big market for it. Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing any animating content in the store. Although I'm not sure what that would look like...
You did NOT just say that
I just love nodes. Maybe you have to be a little twisted like me for them to make sense.
Greetings,
I'm exceptionally fond of Iray also, and I've spent a good bit of money investing in a system that can run it. I don't use Carrara either, although I own it and make a run at it every so often, but my understanding is that its 'effects' (flames, varying density fog, waves/water, etc.) are amazing, and still cutting edge. It's instancing is very powerful, although DAZ has started to get better at that. I think its character import capabilities are sadly a bit bolted on, and haven't worked well in a long time, as the technology of character models has improved. There's dynamics, rigid and soft, which DS definitely doesn't have native yet, although that's a place where they could REALLY use moving that code over from Carrara to DS. Add in Bryce-ish landscape generation, Vue-ish vegetation, AND a whole modeling capability that was great once... It's a pretty impressive product, but it suffers by being a jack-of-all-trades.
DS could certainly use the area effects (water, fog, fire, etc.), and stuff like that, but it likely relies on the render engine as the lynchpin of putting those together, and so wouldn't work with Iray. (While that's speculation, it's very educated speculation.) Similarly, the dynamics are great, and it'd be wonderful to tag an object as rigid and just let it drop into place in a bowl, etc., and mark clothes as soft, and let them drape. That's the most likely thing I see them moving over, or reimplementing in DAZ Studio, but if I were to do it, I'd be re-writing it with PhysX support instead of porting over 10+ year old phsyics code.
The other direction, it'd be wonderful if they cross-ported the Genesis 3 skin and rigging system into Carrara, but that probably involves making a lot of changes to code that hasn't been touched in a long, long time. Similarly the rendering engine could use an Iray option, although again...licensing might be an issue with that, as well as making it compatible with the large set of existing Carrara materials features. Ultimately, if it were possible, open sourcing it would be the best option. Then folks who want a feature, or a capability, or an update, could at least hire/raise money to hire a programmer to spend the time doing it. But...we get back to the problems with open sourcing large commercial projects. Also, just to note, open sourcing it would eliminate the possibility of including HD support for the foreseeable future, because that's Trade Secret material, and that stuff never ends up in open source libraries.
I have a great deal of respect for Carrara, and it's true that this thread is speculation. I'd love to hear what the challenges are directly from DAZ, but I know it's hard to present them in a way that is positive, discourages catastrophic thinking, and doesn't invite aggressive responses either positive or negative. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
-- Morgan
Cypherfox,
There ain't no way Carrara's effects are even close to cutting edge. For example, Blender's fluids and smoke and flames and so on make Carrara's effects look like something from the 1960's. And I recall the cloth sim in Carrara didn't even work with moving objects. Useless for any type of animation. Although I think that VWD now works in Carrara from what I've heard, and that is a lot closer to cutting edge.
There is nothing preventing you from "reworking" the UI yourself. Blender is the most customizable software I've seen, and that's even without writing a single declaration or function of code. In any class, in any category, in any subject matter.
I know you've said that it doesn't work with your brain. Fine, I get that. But... it is INFINITELY customizable, which means that your brain doesn't need to be.
I like Blender because of the shortcuts and the way they let me avoid the mouse. A mouse might be OK for simple thinks like creating word documents but for box modeling a mouse is mostly awful and not too well suited for sculpting either.
I agree. This might anger some, but I think Carrara is obsolete technology. It begins and ends with those damned unreadable fonts. At least Blender lets me change the font sizes and typesets. Carrara is just a "tough toenails, dude." I find that insulting, especially since Carrara was not free.
Personally, I love to see Studio and Bryce go public domain too as I want to run them in Linux. I'm very close to leaving the Mac world and I'm not going back to Linux. Studio is the only application really holding me back. I've even found a (potential) replacement for Final Cut. I bought Bryce years ago before, but cannot run it on the Mac anymore. It is a license that is useless to me.
Customizing a UI kind of requires you to know how things are set up and work, though.
Greetings,
Fair point. As I said, I'm not a Carrara user. I see people doing very impressive things with it, but I'm also not in the communities where people are doing impressive things with Blender, so I shouldn't have spoken to the current-ness of that tech.
-- Morgan
Carrara has uvmapping tools, but other programs have better - just not Studio. And if I use UVLayout on a model, I can still bring it in Carrara just as easily as if wanted to bring the model in Studio. Same is true for the Blender fans. I can bring Blender models in Carrara just as easily as to Studio. UVLayout and Blender (and other programs not named Studio) do not make Studio better than Carrara unless I can't use those programs with Carrara.
** Here is a partial list of some things that Carrara has that Studio does not:
- dynamic hair that is strand based that reacts to gravity, wind, and other objects. The LAMH plugin that allows customization shows a price of $49.95 for me right now (prices vary among customers)
- terrain modeler. Could purchase Bryce as a plugin and use the bridge, but then lose ability to continue to Pose and Iray I think. Current Bryce price to me is $13.97.
- plant editor. Lets include this as part of Bryce, although I think to get the equivelant ability to model custom leaves would need supplements - could be wrong about that.
- replicators with ability to control distributions (instancing). Ultrascatter plugin currently $29.95 to me.
- 3D paint tool not only for models, but also to help control those replicator distrbutions to put those plants on those terrains. The 3D paint tool isnot the same as a polygon selector.
- metaballs and particle emitters (can be combined for fluids, smoke,...). Not cutting edge fluids and smoke, but more than Studio has.
- vertex modeler, spline modeler, formula modeler. Formula in particular is underappreciated. I've heard people complain about waves. Carrara can animate great waves, or anything else formula based.
Programs not named Studo can do many of these functions better than Carrara, so Carrara is not cutting edge. Reportedly, Daz customer service has told people that Carrara is no longer being developed (pesent tense), but wil not comment on the future. So, it is not speculative to say that Carrara is not cutting edge and that is not being developed. But, Carrara does a helluva lot more than Studio currently does.
But, lets emphasize "currently." During the second half of this year, we are being told by Daz to expect some amazing things for Studio. Can't wait. I hope it is not just a sign saying, "Why are you using a Daz product? Go use Blender."
Not to mention that most of Bryce's generated geometry really only works in Bryce. The trees look like crap when exported, the rocks look like crap when exported the only thing that exports nicely is the ground. The Bryce bridge is really only meant for sending Daz assets to Bryce.