Yes! If you start an annual subscription you immediately get a permanent license and the subscription aspect of this pertains to maintenance. If you pay for 18 consecutive months via a monthly subscription for indies, or 12 consecutive months for studios, you will also get a permanent license.

If you cancel your subscription and your license is a permanent one, you can always contact us to buy a year of maintenance to update your license to the latest version of the software.

In our EULA you can read about the specifics and legalese behind what you see simplified below. All tiers are referenced by USD, and if your studio uses a different currency, calculate the USD equivalent based on your revenue or project budget. (see why we use budgets to calculate this in the next FAQ question below).

Indie Licenses are for individuals or small studios that make less than $1 million dollars per year, or have a budget of less than $1 million dollars.

Studio licenses are for studios that have revenues or a project budget between $1 million and $100 million dollars.

Enterprise Licenses are for studios that have revenues or a project budget over $100 million dollars.

What about parent companies?

If your studio is owned by a billion dollar company for instance, but your studios revenue or budget is below $100 million, you do not have to pay for an enterprise license.

Desktop or Laptop PC
Windows 10 or Linux
Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 series video card or higher. AMD Cards are supported as well.
8 GB RAM
Internet Connection (offline activation is possible)
MacOS is not supported at this time

The better your GPU is, the better our software will perform. Multi-GPU currently isn't supported.

If you're a new studio who just raised $20 million dollars for a project, you may not have revenue yet, but you have the budget of a major studio, and in this case you're in the studio licensing category. Budgets apply to what your studio is allowed to spend on a given projects development. For clarification, if your budget is less than your revenue, use your revenue as your purchasing guide, and if your budget is more than your revenue, use the budget as your purchasing guide. We often cannot validate revenue or budgets on new companies, so we have to believe that you make the ethical choice.

When you cancel your subscription, your license key will remain active for the remaining duration of your billing period. If you purchased on July 12th, and cancelled your subscription on August 1st, your license would still be active until August 12th. After this, you would no longer be charged. If you were granted a perpetual license, you will no longer be able to update this license in the future, but you can keep the updates you got during your subscription.

Not if you have a node locked license. This is prohibited by our EULA. Your license key is locked to your specific machine hardware upon activation, but may be deactivated and moved to another machine if needed. If you need the ability to use our software across multiple PC's, look into a floating license (for studios) or purchase a license for each workstation.

We use WyDays turbo float for floating licenses. Please see this link for more information regarding installation & specs: https://wyday.com/limelm/help/turbofloat-server The licensing SERVER may be installed on Windows, Linux and MacOS server machines. (VectorayGen itself does not run on Linux or MacOS, don't be confused).

Floating licenses allow installation of the software on as many workstations as needed. Licenses are managed via a Floating License server which needs to run 24/7 to allow licenses to be "checked out" by a user. When a user wants to use the software, it checks to see if a "lease" is available, if it is the user will be able to use the software. If a lease is not available, that user will have to wait until someone else finishes using the software.

The most common case is when you need a "pool" of licenses to be used across many computers. For example: a large studio that has hundreds of computers but only want 5 instances of EmberGen to run concurrently. In this case, this studio would purchase 5 floating licenses.