Clara.io

» see clara.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2013 a browser could not do very much. Clara.io put a complete 3D modeling and animation package inside a tab anyway, with nothing to install and no plugin to approve. You opened a URL and you had a four-panel editor with a real scene graph under it and keyframe animation on top. The whole thing was JavaScript and WebGL, built on Three.js.

Exocortex was a small company in Ottawa that had been making plugins for Softimage and Maya, which is to say it knew the pipeline it was trying to replace. Clara.io was announced in July 2013 and presented at SIGGRAPH later the same month. The open beta started that November with 14,000 registered users. By December 2014 there were 85,000, and the count went past 100,000 the following year.

Then Exocortex stopped. Development ended in 2015, two years after launch. The money was not in selling a 3D editor to artists, it was in selling 3D product configurators to e-commerce sites, which is the same rendering machinery aimed at a customer with a budget. Exocortex built that on Clara's code, called it Threekit, and eventually took the name for the whole company.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it could actually do ~

More than the pitch suggested. Photorealistic rendering ran on V-Ray in the cloud, so the tab in front of you was a viewport and the heavy work happened on somebody else's machine. It read and wrote the formats a studio already had on disk, FBX and OBJ among them. There was revision history, and real-time editing let two people work on one scene at the same time.

The other half was the library. Clara.io hosted free low-poly models under Creative Commons licenses, and by the end there were more than 500,000 of them. You could publish a scene and embed it in any page with an iframe, which in 2014 was a strange thing to be able to do at all.

~ the quiet part ~

I have never been a 3D artist, so the part of this I can judge is the engineering claim. Running a real modeler in JavaScript in 2013 meant fighting a browser that had been handed WebGL about two years earlier and not much else to build on. To an engineer writing numerical code on a desktop at the time, heavy geometry in a tab read as a stunt rather than a tool, and the stunt mostly worked.

~ what replaced it ~

Threekit raised a $35 million Series B in 2021 on the configurator business. A year and a half later the parent switched off the thing it had grown out of. Clara.io went dark on 31 December 2022, taking the model library with it, after seven years in which nobody had shipped it a feature.

A web application does not need anyone to keep it alive, only someone who has not yet got around to stopping the invoice.

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