Show HN: Clara.io, next-gen web-based 3D creation tool. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Clara.io, next-gen web-based 3D creation tool.

exocortex.com

36 pointsbhouston11 comments

This reminds me of Lagoa (http://home.lagoa.com/). How odd that two companies are doing almost the same thing in two cities that are so close to one another.

It is a small world in the end high 3d space. I have collaborated in the past with the founder of Lagoa. But the main thing to remember is that Max, Maya and Softimage are all developed in Toronto and Montreal. Thus there is already an ecosystem around 3D tools here.

There is a difference of approach between Lagoa and Clara.io the main one is the Lagoa is mostly a renderer where as Clara.io is a more general tool, more ambitious in terms of functionality.

Looks awesome, is this useful for 3D printing? I noticed it supports STL. I'm actually hosting a largish (100-150 person) hackathon in Wollongong (hour south of Sydney) next weekend: http://hackagong.com

We're including a 3D printing competition as part of it and will have 8 printers over the weekend for competitors. Would love to somehow get a beta access hookup for competitors. Surely beats FreeCAD or TinkerCAD

Clara.io is an digital content creation tool focused on animation & rendering, like Maya, 3DSMax, SoftImage or Blender. It makes no guarantee of solidity or that its exports are watertight. That's certainly something that could be done in a post-process step, but Clara.io does not yet support it.

I'm very interested to learn which technologies helped to created the product! Angular, jQuery, Ember, CoffeeScript?

Highly customized backbone variant (faster + increased flexibility) + javascript + coffeescript + WebGL + jQuery + ThreeJS + underscore + well a lot. JavaScript dependencies alone (excluding anything ThreeJS or our own code) are 500KB minified. :-)

We love ThreeJS. For example, I am third in total commits to ThreeJS: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/contributors

Very nice, like what I see and like that you show us :)

How is the business side working?

And how do you build a critical mass of users?

I have lots of ideas for you, but probably a distraction. I've always thought that binary asset mgmt is an unsolved problem and that whilst working with exclusive locks etc is engrained, diffing and deltas isn't as mad as it sounds, for example. Also, most exports are very poorly optimised; tight exports could be a big plus. And so on.

Send me an email, ben@exocortex.com, I'd love to hear your ideas. Be sure to sign up for the beta as well.

Just a quick note that I am attending the Start Up Festival in Montreal today so my answers to specific questions won't be immediate. (SMS me at 613-762-4113 if you want to meet up at this festival.)

How close is this to a full-blown 3D CAD program (i.e. Solidworks)?

It is more art oriented than solid modelling. Thus it is best for video game art, rendering animations, etc. But it can do modelling to a degree but we do not make solidity guarantees at this point.

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