Bit of a surprise: Clarisse and Angie seem to have their development abruptly stopped. The website no longer sells licenses, and various channels have closed shop out of the blue. The website only forwards to a customers’ login page.
According to sources, the company contacted all customers and told them that
they will shift towards another opportunity and that the current line of software is not going to receive any new features with exception of bugfixes. And at some point this is it and they will stop development and service.But they did not had more details for the why and what the reason was so far to make this sudden decision.
Basically after 31 of October, all license will become like a lifetime subscription (but free) and they will provide the tool to migrate the license to another hardware.After that, all licensed users can keep using it free of charge but without any future updates as long as your os support it.
This is surprising to a degree! If that’s true than I definitely have some questions. I personally believed they were doing fine, but I guess not.
My only guess currently is that their development cost is no longer viable and they might be struggling to sell licenses. I would imagine their main target client would be mainly movie VFX studios and I’ve heard only a couple of big studios were using Clarisse. The rest used mostly Houdini + 2ds Max/Maya combination.
The only serious advantage of Clarisse over Houdini was the early adoption of USD pipeline and ability to load billions of polygons in viewport easily. With Solaris in Houdini I guess this advantage is gone now and you can do so much more with Houdini so I would imagine that there are not that many reasons to switch to Clarisse. Another one would probably be Angie renderer but Houdini has Karma XPU which is pretty good/stable right now and also we have access to other renders through integration or Hydra in Solaris so no advantage here as well.
If they really stopped their development it’s sad to see but I guess it doesn’t make commercial sense to them to continue.
Naive sentiment perhaps, but it’d be nice if they’d open source it and gift Clarisse to the community. Or by chance they sold the technology to another party?
They might still send out an official statement later.
Yeah, it was my thought as well but I’d say it is a naive sentiment. I highly doubt such a thing would happen. The first reason is that they invested in the tech and would likely try to sell it. The other reasons that they can’t just dump the code on github. I’m most certain they’d have to invest time in cleaning it up first. Like Moonray did to make it possible to release it as open source.
I’d like to be proven wrong but I don’t see it happening.
I think the biggest issue with Clarisse was that you were fundamentally restricted to their own render engine by design. Most VFX studios have strong preferences toward the likes of Arnold, Renderman or VRay, so the idea of needing to render everything from within Clarisse was a substantial hurdle I’m sure.
The other issue that I found with Clarisse is that it seemed overly clunky and convoluted to set scenes and geometry up compared to something like Unreal. A better approach IMHO would have been to use Unreal as a base model, and improve on it and make it easier and not harder.
I’m sure one of the larger companies will buy them out and integrate their code into their own app.
I was following the development of Clarisse for a while and there where talks about implementing 3rd party renderers like Arnold, but before tackling that, they put all their eggs into the Angie basket.
Angie was in beta for over a year, but then development stalled/stopped.
Also I kinda disagree with your assessment of it being clunky and convoluted to a degree as I find Unreal Engine not that much better, but this could be just my lack of experience since I never got that deep with either one.
I hope that is true, and I hope its not the Foundry (or Autodesk for that matter).
Damn!
Loosing Clarisse is kinda painful, I truly liked the software and I was looking forward to using it.
Yeah, weird. Have been thinking about adding Clarisse to my software pipeline for a while, now I’m glad I didn’t dig any deeper and invest the time to learn it.
I actually had invested some time, playing around with the demo version, watching tutorials, but since the software is relatively easy I stopped after I got an superficial overview of it.
I also had started to put money on the side for the next Black Friday sale, in the hopes that a new release with Angie would drop before that, but then I kinda forgot about it and rather spent the money on an Houdini Indie license and prioritized investing time and effort on Houdini.
My instinct was right, but I wish I where wrong.
Maybe it will pay off and SideFX will buy the Clarisse IP?
If I were to guess a buyer, Epic Games probably wouldn’t be a bad guess…although if this was about 20 years ago I would have said that Apple will probably snatch them up.
The one thing is that I highly doubt that the code will become open source and be gifted to the community. I suspect their financial responsibilities probably wouldn’t let them do that.
Has SideFX ever bought another company? I kinda doubt it because they are in the best position as competitor and I think they don’t need anything from Clarisse.
I think similarly about Epic, but they also have so much money they could just do that out of a mood.
It might also be that they aren’t willing to sell anything and I am similarly pessimistic about any forms of open source project coming out of that.
We’ll see.
I think that the only company that can have bought Clarisse and Isotropix is Autodesk, Epic already has its virtualization with nanite, and Nvidia I think that for the moment it has other goals, the only company that would win a huge advantage would be AutoDesk which could together with Weta and other technologies firmly hold its position in high-end productions.
Maxon is also pretty big, and they have been on a buying spree lately (as in, literally being able to purchase the sculpting crown for themselves). Clarisse being integrated into Cinema would mean scenes with unlimited detail becoming yet another thing that is available to everyone except the Blender community (so another thing for the BF to watch out for as the commercial vendors look to undo 15 years of progress).
Sure…but can they do it with path tracing? IMHO Epic could use some tech from Clarisse, and a purchase of about $50M or so (what my guess is about Clarisse’s valuation) is a tiny drop in the bucket for them.
It’s probably not far off. Maybe by the time 6xxx RTX cards come along? I’ve no doubt that UE will have full path tracing at some stage in the near future.
Yeah, I know. What I meant is that for it to work with Nanite in real time. They’re not there yet, but they might be able to pilfer some tech from Clarisse to get them closer to that goal.
Yeah, well it’s just a matter of time then. It took a year to get Nanite and Lumen working in VR, and this first implementation is still rough. It will be interesting to see which way it goes, and if they did indeed buy Isotropix for tech salvage.
Epic are a bit ropey like that though. They dev so fast and on so many features that a lot of the features get implemented and either forgotten or neglected or become redundant due to newer tech.
Move Fast and Break Things, Currently the most common development strategy in tech. It gets you a lot of cool new technology and enhancements in a short period of time, but at the cost of the software itself being infested with bloat, broken tools, half-baked tools, sluggish editors, bugs, crashes, and a propensity to sometimes corrupt your files. Then you take a look at the source and find everything is being held together by duct tape and glue.
Software houses that do not do this type of thing will typically not make headlines, but users will talk about how the majority of things just work and how they can get stuff done instead of finding workarounds.
Yeah, I think Epic are the worst for this though. The Epic launcher is one of the worst pieces of software ever designed and it’s been like that forever.
And just look at the bloat of UE itself. It’s a massive download and unless you uncheck some of the options it’s over 150gigs.
And it seems that the shader compiler has gotten so much worse over the years. Every time you do anything in the engine in UE5…shader compile…shader compile. UE4 wasn’t nearly as bad for compiling, despite having a GPU 100x more powerful than in the past.
Anyway, I’ve ranted off topic so I’ll leave it there.
