Hello there,

I'm teaching myself how to use Houdini thanks to Houdini Apprentice Licence.

I made a small procedural building generation personal project, and saved it in a .hdanc (non-commercial HDA obviously) to run it in Unreal.
Things went really well and I needed to step back from this projects for a couple of weeks.

Now, coming back to this project and cleaning it to make some shots for my portfolio, I see that Houdini Engine can't run with an Apprentice Licence anymore ? Why did you make that change ? It was a great way to learn Houdini and Unreal Engine interactions and I don't want to spend 300$ just to see what I can do in Unreal with Houdini !

To prove I didn't dream my Houdini Engine session, you'll find a sample of an old screenshot of the project.
.

Please revert this, as I can't even see why this change was made in the first place. It just makes me want to use PCG instead (wich is FREE).

Were you working with a student/school education license at any point? Those can work with HE for Unreal. Apprentice is not supposed to be able to.

Hello rmagee,

I'm only running Apprentice since the beginning (I'm sure about it since I didn't pay anything).

It isn't supposed to work ? I've been using it for weeks '^^.

I'm really sad to hear I'll need to buy a licence to work with HE. I'm not affiliated to any school, so am I able to take the student licence ? And what is its differences with Apprentice?

Best regards,

If you were able to do this with Apprentice then that should not have been possible. It is possible that a new licensing setup that we introduced recently kicked in started enforcing this limitation properly. As you can see on our Compare chart Houdini Engine Plug-in support was never intended to work with Apprentice.

The student licenses allows this because a student will only have access during their school years and it can't be used after they graduate.

The problem with bringing non-commercial assets into host applications is that we don't have anyway to watermark or limit the results which means that people could do commercial work and we would have not way to know. Indie was designed to provide more flexibility under a limited commercial license.

Robert

I see now. The fact that I could make a Houdini session in Unreal Engine with Apprentice was a bug and I thought it was a feature. It saddens me but I understand.

In my case, I train myself on Houdini and HE on my free time and do not intend to do anything commercial with them. What should I go with? Student licence or Indie licence?

Eliott

If you are a student associated with an education institute then you can use a Student license. Otherwise Indie would be your best option.

Robert