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lordgankoo

Licenses/Commercial Restrictions (in the context of 3ds Max

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Lately I've been poking around in the student license of 3ds Max (fully featured and doesn't expire for 3 years - http://www.autodesk.com/education/student-software for those interested). Naturally the caveat is that it's non-commercial, for educational use only, etc. And of course, a commercial license is obscenely expensive.

 

So my question is, and this applies to any tools or software that have these sorts of license restrictions (I believe Unity is the same?): What do people do in the case of learning how to use these tools, wanting to eventually sell what they make, but they're either an individual, or a small group of hobbyists or whatever and would be hard-pressed to buy a commercial license? 

 

 

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From my understanding, Unity is free unless you make $100,000 a year from selling games. If I make that much money selling games, I'd be happy to give them a share. As far as more strict licensing, I'm trying to rely on less expensive stuff and licenses like the one you describe would deter me.

http://unity3d.com/unity/faq#section-452

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Ah right, fair enough. Maybe it would make more sense to learn something like Blender instead? I just faintly recall someone somewhere lamenting how goofy Blender was (great reason to go off, I know), but in this case I suppose there isn't much choice.

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I haven't looked into 3d modeling software yet, so I can't make a recommendation. I do like Audacity for audio and Gimp for drawing though. Both are free and have managed to do everything I need them to.

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I think Blender is great. I don't perceive it as goofy at all, quite the contrary, I think it's very clean and easy to understand. The biggest problem is the steep learning curve, you WILL need a beginner tutorial to learn the essential hotkeys.

 

to answer your original question, I think people generally use those academic licenses that are free or cheap for learning the software and when they get hired they either get a full license from their employee or buy the software for the money they get from working.

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You can always rent a license for Max or Maya for the month that you're working on finishing whatever you're working on. Which comes down to about 200 bucks for a month. So that's an option if you want to keep it completely legal.

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Yeah I'm really curious as to how this works for indy games. I've always just noodled on stuff at work, in which I couldn't resell it in any way possible. But software is F#$%ing expensive, yet there are a bajillion 3d games out there.

 

The whole educational thing is another debate, since Autodesk has a monopoly now it's become nearly impossible for students to get their hands on these products and learn from them; I really think that company is shooting themselves in the foot.

 

Makes me wonder...

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I'm currently learning the very basics of Blender. While I can see the utility and relative simplification of the UI compared to other 3D software I have gleaned on, it's very clear that this is software made by and for modelers that were sick of the other software. It assumes you know a lot of terms, or how two things or settings would interact with each other.

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While I stopped ********* video games long ago, I still feel nothing when I ********* super expensive software just for playing around and experimenting with. I figure the worst thing that can happen is that I learn the program and need it to make an actual commercial thing at some point.

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