Our company is about to receive a Houdini Master license, but the users would like to begin learning using Apprentice licenses.

Is there a way to install several Apprentice (floating) licenses on the license server, so that anyone can run Houdini from a central installation point?

Hi kikou,

Unfortunately not as each Apprentice license is tied to one machine. I would still install Apprentice on each machine as usual & when the Master license arrives, you can use the License Administrator to point to the central License Server.

After all machines are reading from the central License Server, you can delete the Apprentice License on all machines. It's a bit more work but everybody will be happy. I hope.

Cheers!
steven

You don't even need to remove the local licenses just repoint the license server on each machine to your network one. easy peesy

You can also ask SESI for Apprentice licenses on your central server, I believe. However, as we have found out many times, mixing Master with Apprentice will lead to heartache!!

If you are only evaluating Master and not doing serious production, then you should be OK. However, there is nothing worse than having a production file you started in Master get accidentally loaded into Apprentice, then you save it and bang, it's now an Apprentice file!

Even worse, and this remains a serious bug IMHO, if you have an OTL that was created in Apprentice, when you load it into Master it stealthily turns your session into Apprentice _without warning_ which is really terrible.

I've never understood why they can't put at least a warning whenever the state of Houdini changes from Master to Apprentice….

Cheers,

Peter B