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Houdini Indie?


danw

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Surprised there doesn't seem to be a thread about it yet.

 

https://twitter.com/sidefx/status/496684848250368001

 

I don't suppose anyone who knows is allowed to say until whenever the official announcement is made... but what is it?!

 

So far, half the posts I've read assume it will be a cut-down game-development-specific build, which would naturally tie in with the Unity engine plugin.

The other half seem to assume it's alluding to a 1-man-show freelancer price-point, presumably for the fully featured package.

 

I'm trying not to get my hopes up about the latter possibility... it would coincide preposterously conveniently with me setting up on my own.

 

 

Any thoughts? :-)

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It's for sure a new music label ;)

 

I would like it to be an Fx license to allow installs on 2 computers - one office and one laptop. My Rfe if you want to second it:

 

'WorkstationFx license modernised'  ID: 62519

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That kind of thing would be fantastic too.  When it comes to fluid sim, I could easily keep at least four or five workstations well fed with sims, and I am but a single artist.  It's always seemed a little silly that if I could afford the 60k+ cost of some kind of 8-way Xeon E7 supercomputer, I'd only need a single license for the entire thing, and could still run 8 instances of Houdini, bound to each chip.  I have no idea how it could work in a logistical sense, but it would be amazing to be able to pay on a per-user basis rather than per-machine.

Edited by danw
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Huh... how recently did that change? Because actually, that is massively more affordable than I thought it was! I could have sworn the last time I looked, batch licenses were up around the 2k mark.

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Wow, back in April... wonder how I missed that! :-)

Well then, considering that, it does seem like the ideal situation would be as Marty originally suggested - being able to mirror your workstation fx license onto a laptop. That would pretty much cover all my needs.

Still very interested to find out what Indie is about anyway :-)

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That's pretty fantastic in all regards, except maybe the Mantra tokens limit.  1 seems a little tight, even for a "limited commercial" scenario.

 

Well, it might not exactly suit my personal needs... but assuming the pricing is fairly aggressive, it's going to be an amazing package for a *lot* of freelance artists out there!

 

Edit: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=244&Itemid=399
 - Holy crap!  $199?  $99 for a batch/engine license?

That's fantastic!  Okay, maybe the mantra token thing isn't a problem at all! :-P

Edited by danw
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That's what I'm interested to know... I presume a batch license would carry an extra 1 mantra token, and if that's the case, then yep, can pretty much license up any number of machines for very reasonable costs, provided you stick under that 100k per year turnover.  Even if you needed the $199 license for mantra, that still isn't a bad price at all!

 

Absolutely amazing move from SideFX!... as if I didn't have enough reasons to love those guys already (and endlessly bore the hell out of my co-workers whenever I'm contracting somewhere :-)

 

(Also, I presume that IndieEngine/IndieBatch will operate just the same as a regular batch license, so it will be capable of command-line sim caching and the rest, not just generating IFDs)

Edited by danw
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you stick under that 100k per year turnover

 

 

Would that be 100k profit from houdini productions or anything you do as a company?

 

EDIT: Probably as a company, but how will they check all this?

Edited by cgcris
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They say "gross income", which I presume would simply be the sum of all income before tax/bills/equipment/any-other-costs, rather than profit.  I suppose otherwise the water would be infinitely muddier as it's entirely possible for even huge studios to run at a loss.

I'm sure it'd be entire income too, not just Houdini-related income... as that would also be next to impossible to prove.  Ordinary annual company accounts have to be made publically available (at least in the UK), so I guess it's fairly easy to check that.

 

I don't suppose it'll be policed ruthlessly, but if you're at the stage of having an income above that, it's probably well advisable to keep things as honest and legal as possible, lest you get audited :-)

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I've asked SESI regarding the Mantra-with-Batch-License thing... and they've promised they'll answer all questions as soon as the news goes public.  Although LouisXIV's link seemed pretty public to me already :-)  Maybe they slipped up keeping a lid on it before Siggraph.

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