I have Apprentice local license. I tested daily and production builds (16.557, 16.586), reinstalled houdini, reinstalled engine from unity project.. I dropped into the scene standard Otl files from engine and my digital asset, but error was the same.
After day later i saw that the limit of Apprentice [sidefx.com]: Houdini Digital Assets created in Apprentice can not be used with Houdini Engine or Houdini Engine Indie

Does this mean that I will never can't use Houdini engine and test my assets?

Currently, Houdini Engine is not supported with Apprentice assets. However, when you upgrade to the commercial version, we will do a one time conversion of your assets for you, to convert them to the commercial formats that can be used with Houdini Engine.

Ken Xu
Currently, Houdini Engine is not supported with Apprentice assets. However, when you upgrade to the commercial version, we will do a one time conversion of your assets for you, to convert them to the commercial formats that can be used with Houdini Engine.

with Houdini Engine indie ?

I'm also at a corner here, why is the engine listed as free if it's not in fact included with the apprentice version? I'm currently learning the tool and evaluating all the do's and don't and I'm totally in love with all the process and the way Houdini is built, but I can't move forward without actually testing out the whole process.

The license part is really really confusing I'd say. I'm almost certain I want the studio to get the full indie version, but to convince my bosses and the whole team I totally need to see the full process to actually make the leap and global changes to our pipeline, which is not a small task at all. Am I missing something ? There is no ways to test out the unity side of things ?

The free plug-in license is for commercial assets only - it is for customers who have commercial licenses of Houdini to deploy their assets throughout their studios. This pipeline uses .hip files and .hda files.

To show off how these assets work, you can use the Starter Kit [www.sidefx.com] which will work with the free unity plugin license or the free indie engine license.

The FREE Houdini Engine Indie lets indie users work the same way but are limited to 3 engine licenses because we anticipate a smaller pipeline. This pipeline uses .hiplc and .hdalc files.

Apprentice customers can make .hdanc files for use in Apprentice but these assets cannot be used with either Indie or commercial licenses. If we allowed that then a studio could use Apprentice to create all their assets and run them commercially. for students these assets can be loaded into host applications using Education Engine licenses which are managed within a school setting.

The Houdini EULA where commercial, indie and apprentice/education licenses cannot be run in the same pipeline.


There is a chart on this page [www.sidefx.com] that explains a bit about how these licenses work.