galaxiefilm posted at 2:51PM Thu, 21 December 2017 - #4319086

They why did DAZ buy Eovia? I believe to keep anyone else from acquiring those programs. Grrrrrrrr.

My mind is getting fuzzy on when certain things happened with respect to Poser, Daz, etc., but I still think I remember the basic story... Daz never liked not being captain of the Poser ship. Their business was becoming increasingly tied to a program they had little control of the marketing and development of. When Poser got bought by e-frontier there was a period when its future looked unusually uncertain and around that time Daz decided they needed their own platform that they could develop and market, to maintain their dominant position as content vendor and hopefully become a respectable 3D application provider. Again, I'm not sure when Daz bought Eovia, but it was at the time a logical fit. In theory, if people didn't want to leave Poser for Studio, Daz could make more Carrara specific content and attract the people who wished Poser had modeling tools and more environmental presets... Carrara was already in competition with Poser, because it had some of the best character animation tools in its price range, and to an extent, it was also in competition with Vue. And as Poser users were already sending things into Vue to render scenes with large realistic environments and lighting, Carrara could be to Studio what Vue had become to Poser. But instead of improving Carrara along whatever trajectory it had been on, they tried to graft in all of Daz Studio's underpinnings (or at least emulate them) so that Carrara users could buy and use Daz content just as if they were inside Studio.

Unfortunately, Studio, as intended, did become their flagship product. With Studio being a a moving target and receiving the bulk of their development attention, it seems to have proved difficult for Carrara's skeleton crew of developers to catch up to Studio in such a way that the two would have and maintain true parity with regard to handling the brokered content. I imagine that Hex was acquired alongside Carrara with this same hedging of bets reasoning... It could be rolled into Carrara making Hex essentially Carrara without animation and rendering... Carrara's renderer could be added to Hex, if that was what people wanted... Or maybe Carrara gets axed, but Studio gets Hex as a modeling room, and maybe they graft in Carrara's particles and renderer...

It's hard to say what the best case scenario is for this type of acquisition. I never thought they were trying to buy out their competition, à la Autodesk, because they didn't seem to me to be in competition with Carrara or Hex. I think, rather, that they either imagined an end-to-end ecosystem of tools sharing the same content, or wanted to acquire a few patients on life support with an eye on harvesting their internals so as to Frankenstein their own 3D uber-suite.

It may also be that they simply wanted to hire the developers of Carrara and Hex and buying those companies was the easiest way to acquire that talent. Idk, because I've never been in the know on who the specific people on all of these teams actually are/were.