For mature human adults, the normal sense of fair play and not corroding the fabric of society keeps us actually paying for what we use.
For sociopaths that don’t have this, the risk that malcontent employees or customers may find out and snitch them out may be sufficient pressure.
If not, then no, there’s nothing preventing a sociopathic monster who only cares about him/herself to steal the work of others. Happens all the time.
's an intro to Blender series for people coming from Maya…
http://annex2nothing.com/blender-overview/
Also in the preferences you can choose a Maya type control configuration, though I would highly recommend spending some time learning the Blender way. It really is set up to be very efficient, but does take time getting used to.
I hear you. I’m currently trying to get into Blender after learning Maya at uni. It’s a disaster. I’m not saying that Blender is bad - there’s some things it actually does better than Maya - but getting used to it after working with Maya… horrible. I’ve kind of taken a break from it now because I’m just so frustrated. I wish Autodesk had Adobe’s student pricing model (where you get a full licence at a reduced price), seeing as their monthly rates are utterly ridiculous for indies/students/freelancers but oh well…
@FrozenHarlequin Exactly my thoughts 
It’s really frustrating. It takes no more than hour to make me rage quit.
This rather would not work for photoshop made textures because usually they are compressed with some kind of dxt.
But that could work for alleghoritmic materials, and 3d models (esp more complicated ones like rigged meshes). I think even game engines preserve 3d location of vertices (they do not want artifacts from importing), so you could replace like 4th or 5th digit after decimal coma with your information. I also think that with some research it is possible to make watermark that survives texture importing.
But that does not matter for this topic, those companies do not care thet much about piracy, unlike game devs they do not lose as much, and they gain skilled (in their app) people that in future may ask employer to buy their product. It is what microsoft does.
If an indie can’t afford to buy let’s say 3dsMax and uses it illegally that would still be beneficial to Autodesk because instead of having them leave to another free alternative they get to use their product.
That’s not true. The studio will be forced to buy the product and that’s it. People do it all the time.
How is that beneficial to Autodesk? Autodesk doesn’t care if they use the free alternative because they were never going to buy the Autodesk product in the first place.
Nope, if they’ve made a significant enough product, they’ll get legal action with regard to damages or loss of revenue. That’s not a good situation to be in.
It’s beneficial to them in the long term, they are not a monopoly anymore.
By then they would have purchased the software, unless they are really dumb…
Basically, the idea is that a lot of students/indies/freelancers will at some point end up working for a larger company which does use licenced copies. If the majority of employees prefers, say, Blender over Maya, then the company is either less likely to use Maya altogether or at least won’t buy as many Maya licences. So yeah, as many people as possible preferring to work with and being familiar with Autodesk software is definitely sth that would be in their best interest, considering a lot of the people we’re talking about would never have been able to afford legal Maya licences, anyway. So Autodesk isn’t going to lose out on money when those people pirate their software but they are going to have a weaker overall standing in the industry if those people choose to learn Blender instead of Maya. Of course, though, that still doesn’t make it legal.
What if a studio cant afford the costly software and once money starts rolling in they go full legit like buys every single thing they “Borrowed” ? Thought about that kind of thing happening?
Also loss of revenue only works if the people who “Borrowed” Such things could actually afford it in the first place otherwise its just “Well I’ve got bread for 3ds max” or “I lied I had $10.32 over the past year, I’ll pay you those ‘losses’”
Not everyone can afford the best of the best which is what seems to be used lately, People who want to learn Proper industry standard game development cant do it on budget software or free alternatives.
^To be fair, Autodesk does offer free copies of its software to students, those just can’t be used for any kind of commercial work (or by non-students trying to learn the software on their own). I’d still prefer Adobe’s way of having students pay a reduced price for the programs but also letting them use them for commercial projects or maybe the way Quixel and Allegorithmic do it with a cheaper indie licence for individuals/companies who make less than a certain amount of money a year. I’d be totally willing to buy Maya if there was a cheaper, non-subscription licence for, say, a few hundred bucks (at most) but I am, trying to unlearn Maya and learn Blender.
The economic argument about piracy is that it hurts smaller developers much more than the market leader.
The reason is that someone who can’t afford the very high end, if they did not have the option of using the high end without paying for it, might pay for a lower-end software package that’s “good enough.”
Thus, piracy largely hurts the small guys, than the big guys.
So, someone asking you to not pirate probably won’t ask you to feel bad for a billion-dollar multinational giant. But they might ask you to feel bad for Roxanne’s Modeling Software, Inc, which never actually came to be, because they couldn’t compete with the option of “3ds Max, for FREE!”
Considering the costs post-audit are the full MSRP cost of the software with no package deals, along with fines which are IIRC at least double the cost of the software itself, along with the cost of the audit, having 4 pirated seats of Maya will cost a company something like $30,000 total, probably even more, and that can be enough to shut a place down (especially on the indie side of things). And to be frank, if you have 30k to cover the cost of the fines, why the hell aren’t you getting the seats legit?
Not aimed at people posting :
It’s a bit disappointing that people, especially now, still try to justify piracy with stuff like “well I want to work in the industry and I can’t afford the software, and every studio requires that I know it!” or “well, the software is too expensive!”. Autodesk literally gives away 3 year license edu versions of nearly all of their software as long as you have an email address, and besides the non-commercial aspect are exactly the same as the commercial versions. Sure, you won’t be able to make money using them, but if you’re just trying to learn the software you really shouldn’t be aiming for profit anyways.
That’s also ignoring the fact that there are free and low cost alternatives which are genuinely amazing now. Blender has become truly competitive; I was a hardcore supporter from 1.2 to around v8, stopped modeling, and coming back into it recently decided to give Blender a serious go. It took a little while to get a handle on it, but I much prefer it to Max (and Maya). Sure, I was a bit resistant at first, complained a bit about how the software was organized, but that’s because I spent so long in the Autodesk ecosystem. Understanding why Blender does what it does, I’ve been able to work significantly faster than ever before.
Between Blender, the Substance Live suite, and UE4, I’m only limited by my skill, and practically every time I open any of those programs I make noticeable gains.
I won’t suggest that people already established switch over unless they have a good reason to, and if your goal is to work for some AAA studio that uses Maya it’s better to learn on that, but for people that are doing things solo, getting back into modeling, or just want to noodle, Blender is an excellent choice. And really, the skills will transfer, it’s all down to differences in UI and the quality of the tools.
E: To add a little clarification about the audit side of things - in the surveying and engineering world, audits can and will happen, and I assume it’s similar to the game industry. While my company was never audited while I was there(we were really on top of making sure all our AutoCAD licenses were up to date, no trials, the right amount of seats), some other local firms were hit (probably due to an ex-employee trying to get that sweet narc cash), and my boss said their fines were way over what we paid for our last round of upgrades. Considering we paid $30k for our seats, it’s hard to imagine just how much those companies had to cough up. I never asked details, but I have to imagine it led to firings and depending on the circumstances a lawsuit or two.
I’ve worked before for indie studios, 10~30 people, where almost everything they used there was pirated software…
When I face a situation like this, I just want to make sure I’m going to leave that place real quick.
I mean, Autodesk KNOWS exactly who you are, where you are and how many pirate copies you have!
It’s in their rights to break into your studio with cops, lawyers, bodyguards… and just send everybody to the nearest police department, really.
A place where you risk yourself under such circumstances will never be a place any professional is willing to work in.
Every required software have really affordable subscription model now.
If you’re serious about your game making project, then you Can have legally the software you need. Otherwise i really doubt the management of your project is going anywhere in the first place.
Just my 2 cents worth:
I use 3ds Max, Photoshop and Unity at work all day every day, and I’ve got over ten years experience working with them so they’re super comfortable for me to work in.
I use Blender, Gimp and UE4 at home every night for my personal projects, and I’ve got over ten years experience working with them so they’re super comfortable for me to work in.
(ok, obviously UE4 hasn’t been out for ten years, before UE4 I used other free game engines like UDK and Irrlicht 3d).
Works for me, and I don’t remember the last time I ever had to worry about any of the problems listed above 
You won’t have to wait too long until things inproove. In about 6 months or so, Blender 2.8 will be released, and it will be amazing. In 2.8
- Stability will increase a lot, and you will be able to work well with millions of vertices
- New dependency graph will let you do animations not possible so far
- Blender will have full PBR viewport, with Unreal Engine 4 presets, so you will know how an object will look in Unreal while modelling it in Blender. Materials will be able to be exported properly to Unreal, so you will probably use the Unreal Material Editor only for additional tweaking.
- Custom manipulators will make the job a lot easier.
- The biggest addition: templates and workspaces. In other words, templates are for different users, and workspaces for different activities. An example of template could be ,Maya template", which contains the UI and controlls adapted for a Maya user. Workspaces can be accessed from upper tabs, and each one means a certain activity in a pipeline. There could be workspaces for modelling, sculpting, UV mapping, Texturing etc. Also, Blender will have a network system to distribute workspaces to devs inside of studios, so they could use the same workflow.
- Wireframe view system will be more smart, so you will be able to appreciate the location of the mesh components, thing not possible in the current Blender.
In other words, since the UI will be fully customizable by users at even button level, Blender 2.8 could easily be made to work like Maya or by symply swapping the template. There would be no need to pirate expensive softwares.
Edit: is the wireframe view that will be in 2.8. It looks a bit sci-fi, like holograms.
Seriously? This would be amazing. I hope they would include some “metal bleed at edges” functions as well. It’s not like I regret that I paid 300 bucks for a coat in 3D… but I have to rewire my brain again and again if I’m using it. I dun remember when Blender crashed last time. But I remember all the other software that crashes again and again, and again … and again… …AND yet again.
Interesting.
Last time I gave Blender a go it was 1.9 or something; PBR viewport is very attractive feature.
It’s cool that blender would have new function ,
but I’ve had bad experience while many of the material export by blender cause Bad File in Unreal ,
it cause me Packaging failure and took me weeks to deal with :I