Sounds like SideFX is doing just that. It is within their rights, I believe.
Is there an import plugin for Houdini Indie? Seems like that would circumvent their purpose.
I like what I see 
Dang, so Apprentice is no longer free…Boo…
i think apprentice is still free. just the HD goes missing.
so what extactly are the limitations? still not clear to me…
- $200 per year - ok, not bad (if you don’t mind subscriptions)
- gross revenue of your company < $100k - ok, not bad
- animation renders are limited to HD resolution (but stills can be arbitrary size?) - ok, not bad
- uses its own houdini indie file format (so you can’t export obj and such stuff?) - this sounds bad to me!
what exactly is houdini engine? do you need this if you want to load your scenes into different software? how can i get houdini indie stuff into blender? or blender stuff into houdini indie?
You can export and import objects in FBX format. The scene format, that is, the equivalent of .blend, is proprietary.
and is this fbx format compatible with blender? and there are no other export formats like obj? could this be scripted with their python implementation? i guess so?
ah, thanks! didn’t come across this chart.
…another reason for Blender Alembic support 
Yes, thats the only thing missing to get best cross platform 3d package combo on the market today.