None of the three. You buy an Edition once and keep using it indefinitely, including years later to maintain an archived production. Nothing lapses, and there is no invoice waiting for you next year.
No to all three. There is no activation step, no license server to stand up, and no online check. The plugin makes no network calls and runs perfectly well on a machine that has never been connected.
If a license key came with your purchase, it is a reference to quote in support requests. The software does not read it and does not need it to run.
No. Farm nodes never consume seats, whether they are evaluating a scene or running authoring work as part of your pipeline. They do need the plugin deployed to them, or the deformation will not evaluate at render time.
Automating authoring on the farm does not reduce your seat count, though. See the pipeline scripts answer below.
Running the tools from your own scripts is fine and does not itself consume extra seats, including on farm nodes and build machines. But automation does not reduce the seat count.
Seats are counted by the people whose production work the tool serves, not by how many of them touch the interface. If a batch job transfers shapes for twelve riggers, that is twelve seats, even if one TD wrote the script.
No seat, but the plugin does need to be installed on their machine. Playing back or rendering a scene that contains our nodes is runtime use and consumes no seat, including a UV Wrap Deformer left live rather than baked.
Runtime deployment is free on up to 25 such workstations. Past that a Studio Deployment License applies.
Yes. Licensing and deployment are separate things. Runtime use costs nothing, but the plugin has to be present wherever a scene containing our nodes is opened or rendered, or Maya brings the node in as an unknown node and the deformation will not evaluate. Deploy it to those machines like any other Maya module.
Baked data is the exception. Once baked, the result is native Maya data with no dependency on the plugin at all.
Yes. A seat is held by one person at a time. When that person permanently leaves, or moves to a role that no longer needs the tool, the seat becomes available and you can assign it to someone else. No notice to us, and no new purchase.
Runtime use is free on up to 25 workstations belonging to people who do not hold seats. Past that, a Studio Deployment License covers unlimited runtime deployment for that Edition.
It is a one-time purchase, perpetual like everything else, and it sits on top of your authoring seats rather than replacing them. Contact us for the rate.
It counts interactive workstations belonging to people who do not hold a seat. Machines belonging to your seat holders do not count.
Render farm nodes, build servers, continuous integration machines, and anything else running unattended are excluded entirely, so an elastic or cloud-burst farm never trips the threshold no matter how large it gets.
Indie/Educational if your total gross revenue and funding over the last twelve months came to less than USD 100,000, or if you are a student or teaching faculty at an accredited institution. Everything else is Commercial.
The revenue test counts your whole corporate group rather than one entity, and it is annualized if the company has existed for less than a year. A newly formed subsidiary of a larger studio does not qualify on the strength of having no trading history.
Yes, as long as you meet the revenue threshold. Work made under an Indie/Educational license can be sold and exploited commercially with no royalty and no restriction from us.
Above the threshold you need a Commercial license, and that holds whether you are the studio itself or a contractor delivering to one.
Move to a Commercial license for new work. Editions you already bought stay usable on the projects they were already being used for, so nothing stops mid-show. It is the next project that needs the Commercial tier.
Bake it first and the question goes away. Baked data is native Maya data with no dependency on the plugin, so the recipient needs nothing from us and the rig is purely your output.
If the deformer has to stay live, the recipient needs their own license for the matching Edition, because a rig that cannot evaluate without our plugin is carrying our software and not only your work.
No. Rather than ship a limited demo, every purchase is the complete toolset from the moment you download it, with no watermarks, node limits, or disabled features to work around.
If something is not working the way you expect, contact us. We would much rather fix a problem or add what is missing than have you stuck with a tool that does not do the job.
The normal path is a written statement, not an audit. We can ask once a year for a signed count of seats and workstations, and that is ordinarily the end of it. A formal audit is only on the table if we have a concrete reason to think that statement is materially wrong.
If a count comes up short, you buy the difference at the current list price within 30 days. Only if the shortfall runs over five percent do you also cover the cost of the check.
Five: Cap'n Proto (MIT), Zstandard (BSD 3-Clause), nlohmann/json (MIT), nanoflann (BSD 2-Clause), and Eigen (MPL 2.0). Full license texts, and the MPL source offer for Eigen, ship with the release in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.
The plugin does not link the Qt framework. Qt comes from Maya, and is used only through Maya's own Python bindings.
Purchases go through Gumroad, which issues an invoice for every sale. For volume seat pricing, a Studio Deployment License, or anything else procurement needs that Gumroad does not cover, contact us directly.
No. The plugin makes no network calls, there is no activation or license server, and nothing about your use is recorded or transmitted. It runs the same on a machine that has never been online.
Nothing about your installation is stored or managed by this website either.