Carrara Cafe rebuilt
Jetbird D2
Posts: 115
Hello!
I wanted to share some long-awaited news with everyone here. After a lot of behind-the-scenes work, Carrara Cafe has been rebuilt from the ground up!
Over the years, Carrara Cafe has served as a treasure trove of knowledge, tutorials, plugins, gallery highlights, and community stories. Times change and platforms evolve, but some things are truly worth preserving.
We have rebuilt the site into a fast and resilient static archive. Here is a quick look at what’s new:
- Fast & Stable Experience: Re-architected with a clean, simple system with no underlying databases that can crash.
- Restored News Articles & Downloads (Still a work in progress): Historical features, community interviews, and updates have been brought back into a searchable masonry grid archive.
- Dedicated Showcases: Highlighting Carrara artwork, renders, and community tutorials created by talented users.
- Built to Last: A static setup to ensure the content remains online, fast, and immune to server backend issues or database errors.
Feel free to drop by, explore the updated archive, and take a look around!
Visit the site here: https://carraracafe.com
Note: There are plans for future workflow steps to allow additional team members and contributors to help publish and edit content down the road.
On a more personal note: I am not a developer by trade; my coding knowledge is modest, and Carrara Cafe proved to be quite a massive bite to chew. Gemini AI was a huge help in making it happen. I can't make promises that I will manage to achieve all the goals I have in mind for this website, but after going through the old Carrara Cafe content and remembering how adventurous Carrara users always were, I wanted to do my best.
This new version is a lot better than what was sitting there for the past few years—it is functional and mostly free of broken paths! Naturally, there are things I was unable to recover, including some missing articles and old community functions like forums and memberships. Some of that can be regained over time by searching internet archives, while other things can be created anew, with the community continuing to gather right here at DAZ3D.
Thank you all for keeping the Carrara spark alive after all these years. I hope you will find this rebuilt site useful!
Best regards,
Danas
Carrara Cafe Team
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Bookmarked
Thank you! I will try to go through the links and attempt to gather them to the Cafe once I get some rest from the coding part of redesign!
Thank you! Once I get some rest from coding website and regain strenghts I will scout through your website and include to Cafe as much as i can. Well, I already did for quite a few things, your website was the only one with the remaining resources of many topics. There were a lot of things to handle and you website is such a rich and big gem to grasp, it's gonna take a while to go through it all!
Once I feel confident that things are working out well, I may include a link to Paypal if I will learn how to do that and make it in a secure manner. With the always increasing prices, I may actually need help, although I am not a person to be fond on asking for such things, however I also would love to see Carrara Cafe stay running for as long as possible beyond 2029, thus donations may extend it's survival. And I would be grateful.
The best help for now would be to help me with managing resources, many great platforms are now down to which Carrara Cafe used to poind many downloads, so I will try to collect things from internet and figure out ways to include them in Cafe, either host them on the Cafe server (but it is not big in available disk space) or research for a longer lasting platforms that could host files. I will also do my best when time allows to further scan articles and other useful tutorials or things to include in Cafe. This is where remaining Carrara users could help, point me to the right places to search for things to include in Carrara Cafe website.
I will try to make this version of website to have at least a minimal method for other willing people to join and add articles and files to Carrara Cafe, but that is quite a task for a person who is not a coder, so for now, it is going to be only me who is editing the site. Another approach I see is to share project folder with someone who is willing to figure out how it works and we can share updated versions to upload via ftp server. But the project is not small in size, it is 2.3GiB and the more content is added, the bigger it will get.
Website is designed using Hugo under the hood and UIKit3 for the UI,
Thank you all for your support and hopefully from now on Carrara Cafe will be a more stable place to visit than it used to be. Having to deal with databases corruptions was a nightmare and now things should be simpler even with lthe ost convenience of CMS.
Thank you for these efforts. To the extent I still have old ZIP files and similar of public shared Carrara resources from various plugin and other community producers, happy to share as needed. I suspect anything I have you probably already have, but worth checking.
one never knows when a drive fails so an online resource like this is invaluable
Hi, you would be surprised how unprepared I was regarding downloadable assets, during the peak times of community, I was one of those do everything my self type of persons, so I didn't download much of the assets, now I regret that... I used to be kind of a 3rd or 4th in line of the Cafe admin staff and somwhow didn't thing to do full size backups before it was too late. Due to me drifting away from 3D graphics, I didn't notice the massive shifts in communities and didn't expect huge resources and CG news brands go down... So I would appreaciate everything you can share. What you see in current Carrara Cafe website is all that I could retrieve from the backups that I had and added assets from Dartanbeck, Ruudl, and some others who still have online presence and take care of resources.
This is exactly why I am hoping to collect things and hopefully find a place to host them. While storage drives may fail, it appears that online platforms can disappear over time. So much was shared via sharecg and pointed to that place.... Now it is no longer existing platform with whole massive community no more. I have got convinced that it is better to have thngs in more than one place. Even great sites can fall down.
On the previous site there used to be a download page with SDK for all previous Carrara versions. If by any slim chance that could be reinstated it would be a thing of glory indeed..
Hi,
Best I was able to do is track down SDK of Carrara 7, 8.0 and 8.1, so I am uploading C7 and C8.0 SDKs, that should be soon available in the downloads page under SDK tag, previously there was SDK for Carrara 8.1 under publications tag already, but I am changing that to SDK tag, after verifying that the site reuploaded fine, it will be online. Currently internet connection is slow on my end so it will take some time to upload as I have to upload all of it. should be online in about an hour from this post.
For older SDKs hope would be if some of the plug-in developers would respond. I have never been a coder, thus didn;t think to download SDKs of any kind. My oldest wordpress based Carrara Cafe backup files are from 2014, and there I could only dig the Carrara 7 SDK as the oldest one, newer backups didn't even had Carrara 8.0 SDK. So either the backups are incomplete, or around 2014, older SDKs were no longer in the Carrara Cafe server, or they were links to external sources, that I am unable to track down.
Edit, will take longer, SDKs from v 1 to 5 also are added. but my internet connectivity is horrid today
there was some for RayDream and Early Evocia Carrara versions on Internet Archive not sure if still, definitely manuals and old content etc
Wendy, Love you!
I was able to find Carrara SDKs up to version 5! the only one missing now is SDK for Carrara 6
also with vibe coding being a thing now
I am hoping someone can bridge some of the differences in using newer DAZ content in Carrara
surely that's a win for DAZ3D selling content too
I am not of the intellectual mindset to use code, it's like mysterious witchcraft and alchemy to me but I love using Carrara, just use DAZ Studio because most newer stuff is just too hard to use in Carrara
its easier to use in Twinmotion than Carrara TBH
updated with All available Carrara SDKs except for Carrara 6, it is the one talked so much about but so far no success to find that version of SDK.
Honestly, I am thinking if there would be anyone interested to vibe code Carrara, that would be amazing. Unfortunately running it via Wine became hit or miss again, currently if I want to do something in it, there is an issue with 3D view refresh, which is annoying, few months ago, when I tried it, it wasn't there. And few years ago it used to run via wine on Linux even faster than it used to on Windows. Because I am a Linux OS user, I would love to have a natively running version... I don't care about ready made content from DAZ3D store though, so it is a very different desire by me. What I miss is the excitement of Carrara and it's approach to 3D graphics in general. My dream is for plug-in developers to assemble and reverse engineer/create an app, that would give Carrara's vibe with up to date technologies. After seeing so many successful examples of vibe coded apps, some of which I have tried, I can't get rid of this idea. Question is how DAZ3D would react to that. But since they abandoned this gem, I would support that if I was in their shoes and make an official DAZ3D content bridge for that app as they do for other software.
There was a day when I was thinking to approach this on my own, asked Gemini AI if it would be possible for a person with no coding knowledge to do that and it claimed it is possible, but would take long time, while it would be a lot faster for persons with coding knowledge. So who knows. We live in times when finally open source and AI can actually be powerful dream come true means.
Edit: I see DAZ3D has some concept of open source and if I understand correctly, they should be open for current figures tech to be bridged. In theroy it should be possible to make latest DAZ3D content bridge to Carrara 8.5 as well... or something vibecoded....