[Remote Work] Regarding Software purchases/software licenses
high dynamic range
Question:
How do you guys go about purchasing commercial-ready licenses for remote freelance work? Do the new Autodesk and Adobe Cloud services work well for this?
Unless people just use cracked / educational licenses / etc. to do such work?
How do you guys go about purchasing commercial-ready licenses for remote freelance work? Do the new Autodesk and Adobe Cloud services work well for this?
Unless people just use cracked / educational licenses / etc. to do such work?
Replies
No. Not only does this put yourself at risk but it also puts your client at risk as well, which could result in serious problems for yourself. Educational licenses are non commercial licenses, meaning you can't charge for the work you create on them.
If you can't afford to purchase the software consider using open source applications.
That being said rental software is fairly cheap. PS CC is like $10 a month and Maya LT is 35. You should be able to make up the cost within the first day of work.
http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/education-faq.html
So the other real problem is that, as a 3D Character Artist, I'm using 2 - 4 other programs intandem with Maya somewhere along my pipeline (ZBrush Edu license, 3Dcoat, nDo, dDo, Substance Designer, etc). I guess I HAVE to buy commercial versions of those?
For the time being, I'm happy with Blender, although there are a few things about it that are giving me major headaches. Heavily considering moving to a Maya LT subscription, didn't realize it was down to $35/mo.
I've got an Adobe subscription. For 3D I'd start with Blender and purchase software as you can afford it.
It wasn't available when I started, so Blender was my go-to whenever I had freelance work. If you want to give it a whirl, this thread has got some pretty solid crash-course videos that should get you up to speed pretty quickly.
Link
Yeah. You're really between a rock and a hard place. Autodesk isn't really interested in affordability for freelancers...but Maya LT looks like a decent deal if you animate.
As an environmental person I find Blender is as good as anything else now for static geometry now that they have fixed the hard/soft edges issue (still waiting on vertex normals) and the FBX exporter is a lot better. I have a Maya LT subscription and still find myself in Blender for environmental stuff because it's just way faster if you know the keys. Maya is actually the weakest link in terms of value, if you have less than a grand to spend the best bang for your buck would probably be Zbrush, Marmoset, and Substance designer/painter and a CC license (but really I cancelled my CC license because I replaced everything with Substance..but more on that below).
If I was seriously freelancing *right* now I would jump on the PBR / PBS bandwagon and churn out some assets with the leeway that the Substance designer non-commercial license gives you. There are a ton of assets out there that use the older specular/diffuse model but not a lot of the new stuff...I think that this would be a good way to set yourself apart from the crowd. The new CryEngine and UE4 use PBR, for example (along with Unity with plugins) so this might be a good way to leapfrog everyone else with some different skills.
You also run other risks of exposure and company/personal reputation and lose thousands of hours of work, Gamemaker studio had a bug apparently awhile back that would permanently replace all your art assets with pirate symbols and hijack your twitter or something to out you, I think personally thats extreme (as it affected legitimate customers from what I hear to start with) but when its your name, or your studio, you are taking a huge personal risk for you and everyone attached to the project, and your credibility can be called into question over it.
I need to pick up a few licenses myself but i'm holding off till GDC for some potential discounts
So yeah, you have to get licensed if you're going freelance.
Don't know about .max, but maya files are in fact simple human readable .txt files and I don't really see any metadata in there.
Not to take anything away from that but I severely doubt thats possible, or indeed happening, autodesk may by some chance have a method with the max files but it strikes me as supremely odd a client would have a method that isn't common knowledge, unless of course they had a direct link to autodesk, you never know.
still for sure best to stay on the safe side.
As a fresh out of university student, I have not had the opportunity to really count all my costs and income. This is definitely going to be hard as I calculate all the overhead the programs I use to make 3D art cost me.
In terms of selling assets on sites like Turbosquid or the Unity asset store, you wouldn't really have to worry about screwing over the customer. If somebody purchases an asset made with pirated software and gets questioned for it, then all they have to do is show off the receipt and they are off the hook. I'm no legal expert so I can't say what would happen to the seller though.
From an ethical standpoint, I really don't see anything wrong with software piracy as not everybody is made of money. Of course if you can legitimately own a copy of your software then you'll be better off.
My team and I spent around $10,000+ on licenses over the course of 2 years. This was a big deal for us considering we were all working for free and the game was also going to be 100% free so we had no profits being generated. As a result of our spending, I decided to pirate some software, after using it for a couple of days I decided that I had to support the dev because of how useful it was for me but between college expenses, bills, and my own project, I didn't have enough spare money to pick up a license. I decided to contact the dev and told him how much I appreciated his work and he actually laughed at the fact that I pirated it and offered me a special, affordable discount.
This leads to my next point; try contacting software developers to see if they'd be willing to give you some kind of special payment plan. You might get lucky, you might not, but it's worth a shot.
If I were you though, I'd try giving Blender a shot. A lot of things carry over from each 3D Package and if you are willing to dedicate a few weeks (maybe even less) then I'm sure you can quickly get acquainted with a new, free package. Even if you try it and decide not to stick with it, you are still gaining valuable knowledge on how to use the software and more knowledge never hurts.
Good luck!
It's a bit of a tight situation to be in, especially as a freelancer. I hope you figure out what to do with the help from the guys here.
Not that I'm condoning this activity or this process of course, but it apparently worked...
I got my start in effects thanks to a fellow employee who was caught using pirated plugins. The company had to wipe all of the effects he made from the game. They asked me to re-do all of his stuff and I just kept doing more and more.
Another company I worked at had a guy who installed a third-party renderer. The company got a call about a week later demanding they pay for a bunch of licenses because he installed it on multiple machines.
There have been lots of different schemes to screw with pirates. There was a version of Max 3 or 4 that would randomly shift verts every time you opened the file. It didn't totally ruin the file, just made it ugly.
Max file format is bad to use generally. Haven't done it in a while, but I thought you need a copy of Max to convert from .max format? Most converters would require it to run in the background. Maya's ascii format is much better, especially if you need to fix a corrupted file.
From what i've read and seen inside a .max file - .max files carry session times, computer specifications and non-specific license information which may include the registered license name and or other information, including version & license type.
My Lecturer caught a few students with some not so blatant pirated/plagurised pieces of work, through the above. He got at least enough proof to remove doubt. What i've actually seen of this myself is minimal though. Maybe a autodesk guy could give us more info?
I use Edu licenses at the moment as i haven't the money for the full kit but i'm a web dev atm to pay the bills so i only need to get adobe CC.
If you were selling .ma files over a marketplace, you could do the legwork in LT to build up an asset stock (exported as .fbx and .obj's), then rent a commercial license once every six months or so, import your stock into .ma files, and then sell them. Since at no point would you be using non-commercial licenses, everything you sell is perfectly legal.
Not that I'm promoting pirated software. But can't you just open the .max or .ma file in a program like notepad or notepad++ and just delete the necessary metadata?
Hard to tell, I've never actually looked at it before. As others have said, Maya's is pretty readable while Max's isn't. If it were a .ma or .max file, since they're proprietary anyway, there shouldn't be a scenario where those files wouldn't have metadata unless they were tampered with. Deleting it could raise the same red flag as falsifying it.
I swear, they'd probably triple their profits if they just made more affordable licenses for freelancers and personal users.
so like using maya lt for 90 days and paying $1.15 per day?
"The Polycount Forum does not condone software piracy"
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63361
+1
Softimage XSI had right right with a $500 option. Maya LT is $800 and has or at least had poly limits and no MEL or plugin support.
LT has Mel support now and theyve raised the poly limit to 65 thousand.
Maya LT doesn't allow plugin support.
Maya LT has a 25k polycount limit.
With those restrictions, might as well just go with Blender.
**EDIT Just saw the post above mine. :poly122:
Not really a relevant thread for debate on this, but Eddie Perlberg has made it abundantly clear publically max isnt going anywhere.
Didn't know about the poly limit increase. You can also export as an .obj now as well. Good on AD for listening to their user base.
Back on topic, my earlier point was that if you know your needs, do your research, and are willing to do some exporting/importing between packages; you can save a LOT of money in the long run without risking a lawsuit.
edit: An annual license for LT is $400. Considering you get improvements as soon as they're released and would probably want to upgrade every two years anyway, it's not a bad investment imo.
but the reality is that you have to fight for freelance work with the guys that pirate all their software, and most companies won't pay you enough to cover those 4k licenses.
Well yeah, duh.
Thats the price you pay when trying to live off of it. And thats something you have to consider in your hourly rate. There is an investment up front that you need to cover over time and there are follow up costs that will come to you every now and then, new software, updates, whatnot.
Heck i have full Maya, XSI, Mudbox and Motionbuilder licenses I only use to import and save files with.
The truth is also that you have to fight with chinese competition(and as china became so expensive, you compete with half of southeast asia, eastern europe and so on) and at least the studios you are competing against have their licenses, but that doesn't change anything at all. Cracking software and earning money with it, is illegal. If you try to compete with cheap ass service you already have lost, your costs of living are higher than in these countries, you can't be on eyelevel with them at that sector.
And your clients should know that, but it's not always about the price - service, communication, you beeing where they are, those are your strong sides.
that said i also would not mind paying less for the software i use, or i have to use thanks to our clients.
but for me the future feels like it's going for a blender, zbrush workflow, as most of my work is mostly zbrush based anyway.
i have yet to find one client that would accept blender data or objs as final output.
In the end even if they allow whatever for the modelling it's most likely that we have to deliver .ma or .max files.
In my case I do a lot of sculpt work with bakes in xnormal, and the textures they fix themselves with substance etc, then usually they are ok with the obj plus zbrush files.
I heard the same from my tutor when I was at University. He'd been working with Maya / in the industry for a very long time. So I have no reason to doubt what he was saying, from what I understood; there is a method to see whether legitimate software was used.