With the release of the free for non commercial use Mari and Nuke,
Luxology is considering making Modofree for non commercial use
While I personally never understood the appeal of Luxology products,
You cannot deny, there’s a lot of good will surrounding them
What does this mean for blender 3D?
What incentive will the average aspiring 3D artist have to pick Blender over Modo or Mari?
Well, at the very least it’ll make for a good discussion. 
Modo is a great tool and will be awesome to have the soft free. Maybe could reduce the future market share of blender, but it will make important to blender developers improve tools for game developers, something that I think that blender foundation forgive when is the real market that they need win and not the movies.
It’s Mari that’s going free for non-commercial use, not Modo.
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=3&t=122545
Just putting this here to avoid confusion.
That’s an even bigger deal, IMO. There is nothing out there even close to Mari in the free space. Blender is the next closest thing for texture painting, and it’s still leagues away. Having the texture painting tool out there for free non-commercial use is going to be an important milestone for the 3D industry.
I still use blender game engine,
There are people dedicated to free open source software, because it is a good idea, we can all work to a common goal together.
Blender users are like 1 giant orginism made up of many individuals, all growing in different directions.
Modo is not.
Reading their non-commercial page though leaves questions as to just how useful it will be for hobbyists.
Is the final bulletpoint relating to restrictions when used in conjunction with their software or software in general (because if the latter then I’m not sure if you can even use it all that much with Blender).
Also, reading their restrictions, people who are chomping at the bit at the prospect of having true, Hollywood quality textures and scenes are going to be disappointed.
So no plugins, no ultra-high resolution imagery on large objects (by today’s standards anyway), and no texturing of entire scenes at once. It still should be good enough for most people though, just don’t get your hopes up on being able to do the same stuff as the big VFX houses.
Its sounds pretty normal. You should take a look at Nuke non-commercial’s license terms.
Doing personal work with the intention to advertise for your service (portfolio stuff) seems not allowed or at least its in a grey area.
Non-commercial should be very clear-cut. If i profit from it directly via payment or indirectly via youtube advertising for example it should be considered commercial. Otherwise not.
This sort of this thing is very welcome and good for personal training purposes. Especially if you need to know one of these apps for an industry position. Or if you are thinking of trying it out with the eventual idea of getting a license either for yourself or your company.
Anything else it looks like it’s going to be a very difficult grey area and not really advisable.
On the 2nd point. From what I’ve experienced of Blender these last few years I’m pretty certain it can stand on it’s own feet ( especially these days ) and continue to grow and thrive.
About the restrictions: 6x 4k patches per channel is still pretty big. There’s only so much geo that one or two people can make in the first place. Also, the “5 objects” thing sounds a lot worse than it is… It makes it sound like you get 5 meshes total. Mari will merge objects sharing a material though, so it’s really more “5 shader sets”. And since you get 4096x24576px per shader per channel, well, that’s actually a lot of texture space. Just need to plan for it.
That’s the standard The Foundry crippled version of the software though, just like the indie versions of Mari and Modo. I guess it’s a bit unfair to call it crippled when Autodesk does the same thing with Maya LT. But that’s really what I think. Some of the restrictions are just arbitrary things that seem to be designed to just piss people off, like “only 5 objects” or “only 100k polys” or whatever. What’s the point of these types of restrictions? And no python scripting either, jeez. At least there’s always Blender. 
Would you be in need for a free non commercial version when you need to know it for an industry position though? Aren’t you already supposed to know it/have a license for it before you apply?
I guess I am biased since I use the Substance suite. But at least their indie version doesn’t have restrictions. I can see Mari used for movies/TV but for games both Substance and Quixel seem more appealing.
As for the main topic I feel that these kinds of restrictions only make Blender more appealing and I’m excited how 2.8 will turn out.
‘Would you be in need for a free non commercial version when you need to know it for an industry position though? Aren’t you already supposed to know it/have a license for it before you apply?’ …
In very many cases I would say… yes you would… absolutely. It comes back to this thing that’s often said in forums like this. It’s your past work and broader skills set that’s most important. Rather than being bang up to date with the latest version of software x.
It’s very common and normal to need to get up to speed with an app you might be not familiar with or know at all for a new job position. In this case, trial versions especially have often been a bit of godsend.
Most jobs in the industry using the more mainstream expensive apps like Maya and Mari you would be working in-house, at least most of the one’s I’ve known in recent years. If you are already well versed in the software or already have a private license then you wouldn’t need a learning edition its true.
I am sorry for any possible confusion,
Marie Non commercial has a couple more limitations since it is based upon Mari Indie.
further informations upon the additional limitations of the non-commercial
can be obtained via the GettingStarted guide on page 33https://s3.amazonaws.com/thefoundry/products/mari/releases/3.1v1/Mari_3.1v1_GettingStartedGuide.pdf
Yes but this thread is more about the possibility of modo being free not mari
but I suppose I can adjust the thread to suit both
sorry for stating something that may have been said, but it really doesn’t affect my decision to use other 3d software…I primarily use blender for design(wood working) or game assets(for unity atm) because after I learned blender or, came to grips with it :), I understood that, yes, it is a far supierior modeling tool in terms of speed and useful features…while a lot of applications have an absurd amount of “fluff” tools/functions that cater to corner cases…before blender I used lightwave and trueSpace(yes, trueSpace) both were capable modelers, but one was buggy and dying while the other was too expensive to keep upgrading…I’m still glad I use blender and if Modo ever were free I would still use blender.
tools I have used before and since I started using blender:3DSMAX,C4DXL,MODO,wings,silo1&2 and I still came back…but I am a modeler, texture-er, and animator…less of a VFX and rendering guy…hell I can hardly even do node matierials I think the fresnel is broken…or I am not using it correctly
There is a short thread on this up on CG talk. Mainly about Mari.
Quite confusing about what sort of work it’s allowed to be used for.
I would guess future ownership of the work might be a bit of a grey area possibly.
It’s for non commercial work. A lot of people using Blender are using it for commercial work.
I do not think ownership will be a problem. I have never seen that sort of thing in any similar arrangement. In the case of Nuke, there are a few features missing, namely geometry export.
For me, “free for non-commercial use” is code for trap.
I think a lot of people come to Blender for the free, but over time stay open source just in general for the principle of breaking out of the financial traps laid by the closed source and closed culture legal framework.
Open * keeps growing because at the end of the day the closed community is not about the artist, it is about the investor. More and more artists are tired of being owned, or at least that is my take.