Can I use Houdini Apprentice and pay a render farm to render out my scene at 1080p? Just as I would pay for an individual with a proper license to do the same for me? I would assume the second scenario is perfectly legal as I would otherwise be paying the individual to create my entire scene, just this way I'm cutting costs for myself.

For the record this is just a simple intro I am creating for my YouTube channel and that's as far as I'll be taking Houdini in the foreseeable future. I've only just discovered Apprentice is restricted to a max resolution of 720p, and I'd rather not invest any more time only to find out I can't pay to have it rendered at 1080p. Paying the extra for an Indie license PLUS the render farm is putting way more $$$ into this than I'm wanting. Thanks.

Neil

I believe the license travels with the .hipnc file. So if you submit a .hipnc to a render farm you will get watermarked output.

Ah, nuts. So then would SideFX be fine with me trying to hire out the rendering of my file? Personally I don't see issues with that, but it seems something of a gray area…

I doubt it, no one can legally render your file without violating a license agreement. How much are you going to pay them anyway? Just pay SideFX $200.00 bucks for an Indie license and you can render watermark free for a year, locally or on a renderfarm.