Received this email today:<p>Hi Clara User,<p>This is a notice that we are retiring the Clara product and services on December 31, 2022.<p>If you have files that you would like to continue using, please download that content before December 31, 2022 because it will not be available after.<p>We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for using Clara.<p>Sincerely,<p>Clara Admin Team
This is true. I will post a post-mortem on it as some point in the next month. But I can confirm that we are shutting it down:<p><a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@BenHouston3D/109445706917253009" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@BenHouston3D/109445706917253...</a><p>We (Exocortex.com) started Clara.io in 2012, launched it in 2013. But we stopped work on it in 2015. We then launched Threekit.com, which was originally built upon Clara.io tech, but then we rebuilt the tech stack to better suit the commercial product visualization market needs. Eventually Exocortex renamed itself Threekit as it was a viable future. Under the Threekit brand we have raised $65M and have grown to 100 employees.<p>So the company behind Clara.io, Exocortex, has grown and is succeeding, but Clara.io never really made any money in its original mission as an online 3D editor. It is filled with +1M free users. We kept it running for 7 years after we had stopped development, but at some point you have to call it. It is hard to keep such an old tech stack running (it used pre 1.0 Node.js originally and still uses a highly modified 2012-era Backbone.js as React hadn't been invented yet.)
Upon receiving the email, I google it and then got here. This discussion is sad but very informative for me because we are building a platform for users to create, share and embed web based 3D experiences. But based on the experience we had in the past with clients, we stablished some main rules:
- it has to be simple: users don't need to be well versed in 3D.
- it has to be complementary to well stablished 3D tools: blender, maya, etc.
- it has to be, whenever posible, engine agnostic: three.js handles the import/creation stage, but from there, you should be able to populate experiences in any web based engine or framework.
After reading this insightfull discussion, it's clear that we're walking a thin and blury line. We're still in early stages, so I would be gratefull if you guys could tell me what you think about our project.
Thanks in advance :)
Sad to see it go, but I perfectly understand. You may or may not remember, but we had a chat about some of the backing tech about 5 years ago. I am one of the founders of 3dc.io and we are shutting it down for similar reasons. Ironically our tech stack behind both products is pretty identical.
Man, that’s a real bummer. This is the website I would always use to model things with on the crappy school computers. I’ve made lots of things with clara.io and it’s sad to see it go.