How to Get Maya for Free (If You're a Student)

Hi, guys! Today I want to talk about something that I know a lot of beginning cg artists and animators are wondering. How do I get a hold of one of those awesome Autodesk programs without putting myself in the poor house? You may know that Maya runs for over $3,000. You may know that the Personal Learning Edition days are over. You may also know that there are free trials. But 30 days is only 30 days. What happens when that time is over and you've fallen in love with the program? Well I'm going to tell you something that a surprising number of people still don't know. I know this because I got to an art school where you can get a number of CG related degrees (where I'm working toward my degree in CG character animation) and every so often I have to tell people this. Just a few months ago I had to reveal it to someone in my CG rigging class. I didn't even know about it until the end of my first year when I happened to overhear someone talking about it.

Here's the secret: you can get any Autodesk program for free if you're a student at a participating school. And there are a lot of participating schools (mostly colleges I think, but I could be wrong). When I signed up for the Autodesk Education Community, you had to have a school email address. But I now see on the FAQ that that is no longer required. You can register here.

Cropped from my desktop

Now, that doesn't mean you can just go download every Autodesk program and become the King or Queen of Turbosquid or start your own CG company. These programs are for personal learning use only, not commercial use. According to the FAQs, some of the programs have watermarks. I know for a fact that Maya and 3Ds Max do not have watermarks on their renders. However, Maya does have a popup that comes up each time you open a file saved with the Student Version of the software, saying that it was made with that version and is not for commercial use. Also, these programs time out in 36 months (though since new versions of the programs come out every year, this shouldn't be a problem). And obviously, once you graduate, all the free stuff goes away. But those are the only things that could be called "limitations" that these programs have. They are in every way exactly the same as their expensive counterparts.

However, be aware that since these are such awesome programs, they are big programs. Check the system requirements before you download and be prepared for a long installation time. I've got a Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) HP with an AMD Athalon processor, updated graphics card, extra RAM, and two internal fans to keep everything going (it was a birthday gift) and I haven't had a problem yet. The programs probably run fine on regular out-of-the-box computers, though they may react and render slower.

I personally think it's awesome of Autodesk to provide so much for free. I've actually never seen a more seemingly generous company. I'd love to be able to say the same about Pixologic (the makers of ZBrush, which I really want to use). Because, as anyone who's followed Sculptris' development over the last few years will know, they only got it when its creator Tomas Pettersson joined them in 2010. It was free before they got it. Now if they were giving a full-featured version of ZBrush away for free, that would be something to talk about.

Even Maxon, the makers of Cinema 4D have a free student version available now. The license is only valid for 18 months (1 and 1/2 years) but that's still pretty awesome. It beats a 30 day trial for sure.

So if you already knew all this, good for you! I hope that, like me, you're having fun with all these awesome programs. And if you didn't know this (and you're a student) I hope that you're as excited as I was when I heard I could get all these industry-standard programs for free. Again, you can register here.

Have fun!