Hi - I’m at a very small company with about 2-3 serious UE artists generating linear content. It totally makes sense for for Unreal to have a per-seat license cost for us. However, we also have several animators, FX, and texture artists who do the vast majority of their work in Maya, Houdini, or Substance, and just use Unreal for maybe 10 minutes a day to import exported alembics or reimport textures, that kind of thing. They don’t even set up turntables or hit the render button; they just hop in, reimport a few assets, push to perforce, and done.
For minor tasks like this, it seems like having to purchase an extra 10 licenses would be a really tough sell, and probably cost prohibitive for us. A floating license setup where these ~10 users would share 1-2 floating licenses would be ideal (and IMO fairer considering the use case and all of that).
I just heard of this but from what I read this type of per seat license is for non game developers only, and in certain conditions only.
Not all non-game developers will have to pay for the Unreal Engine using the new pricing model. Epic is exempting companies that earn less than $1 million in annual gross revenue as well as students, educators, and “hobbyists.” Companies that make plug-ins for the Unreal Engine can continue to use it for free; in these cases, Epic will continue to get its cut via the revenue share model in its Unreal Engine Marketplace.
I am actually not sure whether we will have to use the per seat pricing plan or not, but regardless, I still wanted to bring this use case up in the feedback/requests section here - in non UE workflows (VFX, feature anim, etc.) usually the publishing process for people creating assets or animating or whatever will not need to open up the final lighting / rendering tool.
e.g. the person who animates a creature in maya will eventually export out an alembic, at which point their job is done - They don’t crack open katana so they don’t need another katana license. Only your lighters need katana licenses.
Unreal is a little different because the last stage of anything is a uasset, which means my animator will publish out an alembic, but then to really “publish it” out they need to bring up Unreal, import the alembic, make sure the materials didn’t fall off or that there aren’t any weird import bugs (off by 90 degrees, bad normals, whatever).
This use case is like 5-10 minutes of work per day, and it doesn’t seem right to require $2k licenses for all of them. I feel like a floating license model would be the right one for these kinds of artists.