License checkout (VFX licenses only)

The license check out is optimized to maximize the usage of your licenses:

1. Atoms licenses are now evaluated in the following priority order: Atoms Procedural, Atoms Framework, Atoms VFX/Realtime. If Atoms tries to use a procedural license, but no procedural license is available Atoms will try to check out a Framework license. The same thing will happen for a Framework license, Atoms will fall back to an Atoms VFX license if no Framework license is available. For this reason all licenses can be used for rendering (i.e. Atoms Procedural, Atoms Framework and Atoms VFX ).
2. Users can still disable this behaviour by setting the TOOLCHEFS_DISABLE_FORCE_LICENSE environment variable to "1".

When are licenses checked out?

Atoms Procedural:

• When loading AtomsMaya or AtomsHoudini plug-ins.
• When loading Gaffer, Clarisse or Katana plugins.
• When rendering with Atoms procedurals.
• When using the APIs to perform basic actions such as reading metadata files or caches

Atoms Framework:

• When using the APIs to perform actions such as writing metadatas or running standalone simulations
• Maya - when running Atoms commands, such as the cloth cache exporter, skeleton exporter, etc.
• Houdini - when running Atoms Houdini hscript commands or using the cloth cache exporter node
• When running Maya or Houdini in batch mode.

Atoms VFX:

• Maya - when creating any of the crowd simulation nodes (i.e. tcAtomsGroup)
• Houdini - when creating any of the crowd simulation nodes (i.e. tcAtomsGroup)

Atoms Realtime:

• When using the Atoms Unreal plugin (Unreal does not use any license when using the Atoms Cache actor)