Hello!

I am fairly new to Houdini and I'm confused about licensing of Houdini Engine.

I am using Houdini Indie and I work remotely with a studio that does not have any Houdini licenses. They do make more thank 100k a year. I would love to make HDA for their use in Unity.

1) Do they only need Houdini Engine - $795 USD?

2) Is it ok for me to create HDA and give to their Level Designers for use in Unity?

3) Does Houdini Engine Assets ‘work’ for all the people that do not own the Houdini Engine License? Only a few persons would be using the HDA but what about the others who don't? Can they use the scene files with HDA? How does it work for people who do not have a license? What about SVN compatibility?

4) What about build agents? Do they need separate license?

The company I'm working is considering a buy but I doubt that they'll pay a license for every person in the project - seems to be too much if only 2-3 persons are actually using it.

I believe your question has been answered through our support, but for anyone else looking for similar answers:

1. If the other company will not be creating assets in Houdini, but would still like to modify (cook) assets in Unity (or game engines), then yes, they only need the Houdini Engine license.

2. No, the EULA does not allow mixing licenses for the same assets. So if you create HDAs with Indie, you can't use commercial license to work with it.

3. Once the HDAs have been cooked and saved in a Unity scene, then they can be used as is without a Houdini Engine license as long as they don't need to be recooked (modified) via Houdini. Now if you want to keep it clean and ensure that the other artists are not tempted to mess around with the HDAs, one way to ensure this would be to have a “work” scene where you work with the HDAs, then bake out to a prefab, and instantiate the prefabs in the real scenes. If you ever need to update those prefabs, you can bake out to a new prefab, then just drag & drop onto the previous prefab. It should update the instances.
Note that you still need to have the plugin folders (Houdini/, HoudiniApi/) checked into SVN (including the .meta files). Currently the baked prefabs still use the Houdini plugin scripts, hence the requirement to check in the plugin folders into source control.

4. If you mean build systems like nightly builds, then no, they don't need a license as long as they are not cooking or modifying the HDAs to regenerate through Houdini.