I am experimenting with the free version - before moving on to the HD. I am a hobby user, and learning Houdini for fun. I have managed on my iMac under mountain lion to compile and load a the star SOP into Houdini. It was very simple and very satisfying!

I know from the front end Apprentice is very restrictive about what you can export out. I think you can (but I do not not how to work the Front End well enough to do it yet) get .obj sequences, and .mdd out. Eventually I will get around to learning how to do that.

I have tried to do an fbx export via HDK but my call of

// Initialize the exporter first
did_succeed = fbx_exporter.initializeExport(“test_out.fbx”, start_time, end_time, &export_options);

if failing and returning false.

Maybe the call of initializeExport does some licence checking - if so fine I can't do it - if not then I would like to get it working since if the HDK allows it then I see no issues in me getting around a front end restriction using the HDK.

I would also like to write a plugin to export fluid or particle sims - more for the challenge than anything else. Again if the HDK allows it then I see no issues in me doing it - but if the HDK does disable such things via the licensing system fine I am wasting my time trying - again no problem.

I am posting this to find out if in principle you can use the HDK with the Apprentice versions to get whatever you want out - provided you do all the hard work and write the code!