Indeed it’s all well said and Bob is a smart guy and so is Behzad and so too is Stan, but so was Antoine and this last post gave me pause to look back a bit and try and put things in perspective:
Hi, Antoine Clappier former CEO of Eovia posted a history of Carrara and so I am reposting it here.
(And I in turn 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 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1991: Ray Dream ships Ray Dream Designer 1 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1991: Adam Lavine founds Specular International (maker of Infini-D). (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1991-93: Ray Dream ships Ray Dream Designer 2 (unknown date!) (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1994, Jan.: Ray Dream ships Ray Dream Designer 3 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1995, Q4: Ray Dream releases Ray Dream Studio 4 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1996, May: Ray Dream, Inc merges with Fractal Design Corp. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997: April: MetaTools, Inc acquires Specular International. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997, Feb: MetaTools, Inc merges with Fractal Design Corp. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997, May: MetaTools/Fractal Design becomes MetaCreations Corp. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997, June: Antoine Clappier et al. found RAYflect (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997, June: MetaCreations ships Infini-D 4.0 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997, July: MetaCreations ships Ray Dream Studio 5 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1997, September: MetaCreations ships Ray Dream 3D (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1998, May: MetaCreations ships Infini-D 4.5 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1999, June: MetaCreation acquires RAYflect, ships Ray Dream Studio 5.5 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1999, December: MetaCreation ships Carrara 1.0 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
1999, 2000 : MetaCreation sells its graphic software:
- Poser goes to Curious Labs
- Painter, the KPTs, Bryce go to Corel
- Canoma goes to Adobe (And everyone thought they were going to die)
2000, Nov: Eovia Corp is founded. Eovia acquires Carrara (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2001, Jan: TGS announces the acquisition of Eovia Corp. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2001, March: Eovia ships Amapi 3D V6. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2001, June: Eovia ships Carrara Studio 1.1 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2002, June: Eovia ships Carrara Studio 2.0 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2002, Aug: Eovia ships VectorStyle (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2002, Nov: Eovia ships Carrara 3D Basics (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2003, March: Eovia ships Power Pack (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2003, March: Eovia ships Amapi Designer 7 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2003, Sept: Eovia ships Carrara Studio 3.0 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
UPDATE:
2003, Dec: e-frontier acquires Curious Labs maker of Poser (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2004, April: TGS (owner of Eovia Corp.) is acquired by Mercury
Computer Systems. I leave the company. Eovia Corp. is spun-off. (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2004, Sept: Eovia ships Carrara 4 and Carrara 4 Pro (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2005, May: Eovia ships Hexagon (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2005, Oct: Eovia ships Carrara 5 and Carrara 5 Pro (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2006, Apr: DAZ acquires Eovia Corp. Ships Hexagon 2 (And everyone thought it was going to die)
2006, June: e-frontier acquires Amapi Pro / Eovia Europe (not official)? (And everyone thought it was going to die)
Antoine Clappier
President
Thanks Antoine for the history lesson, I’m still modeling in Amapi and Hex and rendering in Carrara,… March 31, 2007... Nope, not dead yet.
Steven