Clara.io Shutting Down

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834828

by tarr11 • 4 years ago

78 35 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Received this email today:

Hi Clara User,

This is a notice that we are retiring the Clara product and services on December 31, 2022.

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.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for using Clara.

Sincerely,

Clara Admin Team

bhouston11• 4 years ago

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:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@BenHouston3D/109445706917253...

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.

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.)

tomp• 4 years ago

Why not open-source it?

Benjamin_Dobell• 4 years ago

Nothing to add on Clara.io. However, just wanted to state that Ben Houston is/was one of the more prolific three.js contributors (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/graphs/contributors) and consistently pushed three.js in a better direction. Thank you!

bhouston11• 4 years ago

Fun fact, a lot of it is open source, just not where you would expect it. During the creation of Clara.io I created over 200 PRs to Three.js:

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3A...

Open sourcing it wholesale at this point is a challenge because parts of the tech stack became parts of Threekit.com. Threekit.com is VC funded and an ongoing business operation.

I do what I can with open source still, see:

https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph

https://github.com/threeify/threeify

MuffinFlavored• 4 years ago

If 20,000 people are using it a month, why not ask some of them to pay?

stevage• 4 years ago

Wow, a million users of something that hasn't been worked on in 7 years? How many are active?

bhouston11• 4 years ago

20K in the last month. We have a lot of hit and run users who mostly just want to download something from the 3D model library at https://clara.io/library

BTW here is what free users are editing right now: https://clara.io/library?gameCheck=&public=&filter=&sort=-mo...

mrtksn• 4 years ago

Wouldn't someone be interested in taking over? The domain name itself should be worth something too, it's a beautiful name.

bhouston11• 4 years ago

Name of my first daughter, Clara, who was born roughly around the time of launch. :)

danrocks• 4 years ago

I wish I could pay you a beer to hear the whole story in person.

famahar• 4 years ago

So every 3D model not downloaded by the end of the year will disappear? 100000+ models that can help hobbyist creators build their dream project. I'm sure there are archivists that would gladly save them all so others can use them, but 1 month is quite a deadline. It's sad to see such a large amount of resources just disappearing

tomcam• 4 years ago

Reading through your answers I’m hugely impressed by your honesty and forthrightness. Hoping Threekit gets huge.

eerikkivistik3• 4 years ago

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.

bhouston11• 4 years ago

Yeah unfortunately nearly every company that tried to be a general web based 3D editor failed to find a market.

There is a new generation now out so it will be interesting to see how that goes: womp, spline.design and I guess vectary is still around. I think there is another recent one as well but I can’t remember the name.

I think the AI driven tools is the next hot area personally.

I think Blender is the real 3D editor that won over the last decade.

eerikkivistik3• 4 years ago

For not fully featured 3D editors (which takes so much work, I won't even get started), I think the trick would be to bundle it with something that uses the output and that part generates the revenue. Roblox is a great example of that.

sandkoan• 4 years ago

Is there a particular reason that web-based 3d editors failed to find a market? Is it just that those working in the modelling space are already well-versed in actual editing tools, so they don't really have a need for something like this, while the average nontechnical/nonspecialist consumer has little reason to edit 3d? Because Figma seems to have taken off despite having largely a similar model.

Would a collaborative version of the 3d editor concept be more of a success?

tamat• 4 years ago

WebGLStudio creator here, yup, there is no market for generic 3D solutions. You need to find a very specific niche to have some revenue.

AgusEchenique• 4 years ago

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 :)

badungus• 4 years ago

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.

Jaki-Z• 4 years ago

same.

Clara.io Shutting Down

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