Somewhere over at DAZ, there is a thread which goes through the whole history of Carrara.  Just for fun, I'll write a little bit about C for those who might be interested.

My first swipe at Raydream was actually a version of it that was packaged with corel and it was called coreldream (weird).  Later, I found it separate as Raydream.  I bought every version of it that came out after that (not too many I don't think, I still have them but in storage in a whole different country at the moment).

One day Metacreations merged Raydream and Infini-D (a package I never used) and poof, Carrara.  I bought the very first Carrara release by metacreations.  The vertex modeler we have in C isn't a whole lot different than that first version.  There have been several upgrades to it and some nice additions but it's really mostly from Raydream.

While all of that was going on, Amapi was also being developed and upgraded and was "alive then".  Amapi was a full blown vertex AND NURBS modeler all in one beasty.  That package was quite powerful and I also own the latest and greatest flavor of it (also in storage).

Well, Metacreations gave up C and we were sort of hanging in the wind for a little while.  The first version of C was super buggy and the teeny community of people who were capable of even finding a copy circulated the one and only patch that was released before Metacreations disappeared.  It was sort of crazy at that time not knowing what was going to happen!

Eovia picked up C and released a second version fairly soon (which had many bug fixes).  They also stripped Amapi WAY down and released it as Hexagon.  Hex is just the vertex part of Amapi with just a few upgrades and changes.

I find it interesting that Hex and Bryce Pro are being given away for free.  It makes me wonder what the plan at DAZ is.

In the 14 years I've been a part of the Raydream and now Carrara community, I've seen the people who use C divide themselves into two general groups.  When things were first getting going, computers got cheap enough and powerful enough that packages like Raydream could be used by a lot of general people (versus proffessional big wig shops who had tons of money).  There were lots and lots of people out there who wanted to learn computer 3D and all of a sudden there was computer hardware and software cheap enough for most people to try it but there weren't many resources for teaching and learning it.  At that point, websites like Renderosity were really important because those kinds of resources were one of the main ways people could get problems solved, get answers to questions, and learn.

From my limited point of view, this community has split.  One group of people who were pretty serious about it went into it in some form of occupation with it.  Today, we have a lot more software options and computer power is of course phenomenal in comparison.  There are also quite a few more places where you can take classes from real people with real students and you can learn computer 3D a lot faster in that mode.  There are also more jobs available in several different places whereas 14 years ago, there were very few.  So, one group which are people who want to make a kind of job out computer 3D imagery have done so and have moved on from C into other software packages which are more powerful.

The other group of people are more into making and rendering images which are "hobbyist" in nature.  I would say that a large number of these people put 50 hours or less into an image and a lot of these people use models which are collected from resources that are already built versus building their own.

In the last several years, the changes made to C have had a heavy weight put onto poseable figures and some animation upgrades.  This has certainly improved C's market share.  The C gallery at Rendo is dominated by renders with the human form as the focus.  Clearly, the interest in that sector of 3D artwork is immense and C's user base has grown a lot by providing the ability to generate images with those components.

What I think would increase C's marketshare even more would be tools and rendering options which would improve C's outdoor and landscape rendering ability (clouds and atmosphere modeling).  A fluid solver, and massive upgrade (or replacement) of the metaball modeler would also help.

We've had a lot of discussion about a new rendering engine.  I admit that there are rendering engines out there which can produce more realistic results than C currently does but I will also say that I believe that a lot of people don't push the current rendering engine as hard as they could.

I don't know where all this blathering came from but I've been thinking about this stuff the last few months so it's worth writing down somewhere.

-Kix