Thank you very much for confirming this. Would it be enough to have a trial installed? I’m guessing not, as they most likely thought of that when collaborating with Epic on the translator. Or it is probably against the terms of the trial.
Unfortunately with this implementation it makes Datasmith less useful in my situation. If I had an Alias licence then I would not necessarily need Datasmith to tessellate the geometry as I can export directly from Alias as an FBX or convert the data to a .STEP to be used within another other CAD translator.
An Alias licence is currently £5388 per year for the cheapest offering and £19326 per year for the most expensive offering. Even at the cheapest tier this is a crazy amount of money required when all I need to do is convert the file to polygons or to a non propitiatory CAD format.
I’m just very lucky that Maya and Studio Tools (Alias) used to be part of the same code base. This at leasts allows the ability to open .wire files as nurbs in Maya (with limited functionality) or translate them using the ATF plugin.
I appreciate Proprietary file formats can only be utilized and integrated to the extent that the owner of the file format will allow, as this is the nature of closed source software and businesses wanting to protect their interests by using encoded file formats. I dread to think how many licences exist just to decode encoded file formats. It must be a good passive income for the likes of Autodesk.
Worst case scenario I can use a client laptop to access Alias or have them send me .STP files instead.