Someone asked me if they could use Arnold with a standalone Softimage license.

Yes, of course you can. You can use Arnold with a trial version of Softimage; the Arnold license is completely separate. As long as you can start Softimage and load the SItoA plugin, you can render with Arnold.

The SItoA plugin itself is not licensed. It isn’t until you start a render that Arnold checks out a license.

So, how does it work if you have one Standalone Softimage license and five Arnold licenses?

• You use your standalone license to run Softimage, build your scenes, and set up your lighting, shading, and texturing. Every time you do a render region, or render a frame, Arnold will check out a license (and check it back in when the render is finished).
• To set up a five-node Arnold render farm, you don’t need any more Softimage licenses, because you’ll use xsibatch -processing -render to do your batch rendering. Just install Softimage on five more machines. You don’t need to activate Softimage or anything. You’ll still be able to run xsibatch -processing -render on those machines, because -processing skips the licensing check.