We have a Houdini FX license. We need to use various freelance Houdini artists for this project, but most of whom we encounter are using the Indie license. From what I've read, there is a 'one time only offer' where you can get a bunch of .hiplc and .hdalc files converted at once when you first purchase your license, but after that there's no easy way to interchange files between the versions.

How do other studios deal with this?

We can't buy full FX licenses for every freelancer we need to use, that would be both impractical and really expensive.

That's the whole point, if you don't qualify for indie you can't have indies create tools, hip files and such for use in the pipeline. They can open your fx/full houdini files but they are downgraded to indie format when saving. If you want to use indies you can but they can only give you baked deleveries (renders, VDBs, etc) but not HDAs or hip files and such. There are a few other license technicalities:

https://www.sidefx.com/faq/indie-new/ [www.sidefx.com]

(I'm not a lawyer so make sure to double check with sidefx)

If I would work as freelancer for a client that do not qualify for Indie I would first of all check that there is a decent income for the work done. Then I would rent the license needed to do the job. In my country (Sweden) this cost is paid before income tax is drawn.

At the moment I have another full time job and do not really need to worry about these things.

The things I do without commercial license is usually code and knowledge related, and this can only be sold commercially on the Orbolt market.

I think it is fair to rent licenses for commercial projects, but use Apprentice or Indie when you are learning things.

Yeah, that is what I've always done when I was a freelancer:

I kept an indie license for myself, since I met the requirements. I used that for all self-contained projects done by myself. If I was working with a larger studio in their pipeline, I either used their VMs and a license that they owned or I rented an FX license for the duration of the project.

There's no way to use an indie license as part of a larger pipeline.

As far as I've been able to understand the limitations to the Indie license it is primarily founded in the difference between being a provider to a client or being a partner (Official FAQ regarding Indie license [www.sidefx.com]). For example if you get paid to provide HDA:s or .hip (hiplc) you are a partner. If you provide rendered or baked data you are a providing data to a client. This will determine for example the revenue limitation.

For the Indie artist this has a benefit. If you as an individual develop great methods to do things a large organisation can not simply take this information and reuse it. Remember that Houdini is primarily a procedural system, meaning networks and nodes are supposed to be reused. A client simply get, and pay for, the outcome of your work, and not the tools or methods used.

So now as an mainly Indie user, as it seems, there are a bunch of options to make money:

Indie only license

• Final renders or render layers
  
• USD exported files [www.sidefx.com]
  
• FBX, Alembic or OBJ (See the official license comparison [www.sidefx.com])
  
• Orbolt converting assets to FX (See Orbolt FAQ [www.orbolt.com] and SideFX staff comment [www.sidefx.com])
  
• Work with code because this can be used for Indie and also if you upgrade to core or FX
  
• Cooperate with other Indie artists. There are basically two approaches. (1. Partnership) In one case a team share assets such as hiplc and hdalc files. (2. Client relation) Another way would be only sharing exported data and not any hdalc or hiplc.
  
• Teaching materials for example paid tutorials.
  

If the client company will not import any hiplc or hdalc I do not see a requirement for licenses beyond the Indie one to get things working. (see Indie FAQ [www.sidefx.com])

The Indie artist is upgrading to FX-license:
The reason for this could be for one or more projects that are paid higher than the Indie revenue limit or to work as a partner with a company importing hda or hip files (not hdalc or hiplc) into an FX-license.

• Renting an FX-license for a project period.
  

The Indie artist simply work with a larger company's Core or FX-license:

• Relocation for a limited time.
  
• VMs (as mentioned by made-by-geoff) and I’d expect this works with VNC/RDP? (this might require additional licenses)
  

In the official license comparison [www.sidefx.com] it is obvious which are the data formats that have direct limitations applied. For example, after SideFX permitted commercial sharing of the USD [www.sidefx.com] format the "lc" in .usdlc was removed. When you export various formats using the Indie license you can keep an eye open for any ”lc” suffixes.

As a reminder: These forums are not guaranteed to be moderated by staff so the legal responsibility is yours.

If you find anything contrary to SideFX policy (EULA [www.sidefx.com]) please inform us. Interpreting the EULA can be kind of difficult if you are not used to interpreting long legal documents. For example one could interpret it as if you may not use Educational or Apprentice license if you ever expect to make revenue (search the EULA for the word "revenue"). That would be opposite of what I believe is the intention of those licenses. Who would ever learn this advanced software without expecting any revenue? (okay, I'm aware those people exist, but seriously I do not believe SideFX professionals are here to entertain hobbyists). Probably the best way to be sure is to keep an eye on the official statements done and just maybe check with the company [www.sidefx.com] if in doubt. These things change over time as well.

Some related links:
The Indie FAQ is here [www.sidefx.com]
The official summary of the Indie EULA is here [www.sidefx.com].
The official license comparison [www.sidefx.com]
The official EULA [www.sidefx.com]