Arnold Standalone Education Network Licenses

[lennart.oberscheidt]

Hi guys,

I'd like to update our school network render licenses to Arnold 6. We're working with 6 at the lab for quite some time now (within Maya), but I can't figure out how to obtain them. On the Autodesk Education portal when downloading Arnold, I only get the sdk and tools, and Arnold 2020 is listed a single user license in my teacher account. I can see the 3000 edu network licenses for Arnold 2018 in my account as well.

With the new education portal, things have become a bit confusing. Are school network licenses actually still available?

Where would I even get the license file for that Arnold 2020 single user license that I obtained by downloading the 6 sdk?

Cheers

Lennart

[lennart.oberscheidt]

Quick update: Well, the single user works by signing in just fine, but that's not what I'm after. After about an hour of frustratingly clicking the Autodesk education portal to allow me to access network licenses in different browsers, I finally managed to make it work by furiously left and right clicking the "school deploy with network license" menu (all of them were grayed out) until it suddenly worked (which, btw is quite annoyingly typical for autodesks always-half-broken-website). However, I get a serial number and the product identifier. I've tried the old way of registering it with Autodesk via register.autodesk.com but that leads…nowhere. Just doesn't do anything. I can't see the network licenses in my account. This is ridiculously stupid as always. Anyway, I could of course contact support, but you guys are usually way faster in responding and maybe know how obtaining the network license file is supposed to work?

[Stephen.Blair]

I'm Arnold support, not one of "you guys', but I'll try to answer...

The only way I know to activate a serial number is to go to registeronce.autodesk.com

That web page opens for me, and I can click Register to continue.

[Stephen.Blair]

You have to be an IT account, I think, to get to the network license.
Since the switch to Sheer, I can no longer fake my way through the education portal.

[lennart.oberscheidt]

Hey Stephen! I do consider you one of the very helpful "you guys" 😉 Autodesk support and finding documentation on things can be tricky sometimes, and it does get frustrating. I think everyone on the Arnold team is way more helpful then what I'm used to from other parts of Autodesk. This wasn't supposed to be a rant – but we've had issues like this (mainly with autodesks ever changing website) since ages. And it never gets better. Starts with the whole education website sometimes letting you log in, sometimes throwing you back to the landing page. Try again 7 more times and it magically works, licenses not showing up on the products page etc. As you may understand, if this wasn't regularly the case, I probably wouldn't have sounded so negative. But sometimes things just get ridiculous. We've had Maya installations stuck at randomly 33%, 39% all morning, while working absolutely fine on other pcs, couldn't get the network license since the edu page forms just weren't working and then magically were on different machines and browsers… basically, nothing really worked, and that's unfortunately quite often the case with Autodesk products, over the years you just know some tricks to deal with that and get it to work. And honestly, you have to figure all of that stuff out for yourself – new users usually wouldn't even know there is a "registeronce.autodesk.com" page at all. Anyway – I can click register as well. However, entering the serial (network) doesn't lead me anywhere. No page that follows. It loads, back on the same page. tried that a whole lot of times this morning on different machines and and different browsers. Which is why I assumed you're supposed to obtain the license file in a different way, that's not even documented anywhere. Which is why I came here, knowing that "you guys" (as in the arnold team) are usually helpful and pretty fast to answer. At least you could confirm for me that this is how it is still supposed to work 😉

Well, I'll try again later. Maybe, like everything else, it will just magically work then.

Thank you very much! I'll let you know if it works.

[lennart.oberscheidt]

Maybe, since you are already here: Regarding those stuck Maya 2020.2 installs that I mentioned. Might be nothing or might be something, since I restarted the machines a lot of times when being stuck at 33 or 39%. After being left with a half broken Maya 2020 install, and having no luck installing 2020.0 on those machines, I downgraded arnold to Mtoa 4.0.0 on all of those machines, and the installs went through. Might actually just be a coincidence, and it was a desperate try as in "well, maybe it just doesn't want to overwrite the new mtoa or something" but since it actually wen't through after that on all machines (all other machines had 2018 and 2019 with newest mtoa installed but not 2020, the 2020.2 install went through on all of these).Might be something you'd want to look into, but as I said, not certain about there actually being a connection. Might have just been one of the restarts that did the trick. Again thanks. And as I said – I found "you guys" to always be very helpful 🙂

[Stephen.Blair]

@

Can you send the serial number to support @ arnoldrenderer.com?

I'll check it in the Autodesk system.

I'm not working today, but I'll check in periodically ...

[lennart.oberscheidt]

Hi,

I tried again just now (register.autodesk… which leads to registeronce.autodesk.com) and it worked just now. I have no idea why it didn't before. Same browser, same computer I tested with this morning. Maybe the system was down for a longer period?

Anyway, thanks for your help and thanks for offering to investigate further. I'll now setup the license server but I don't expect any more problems now 😉