Terms of Service

1. Agreement to Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the software, licences and services (together, the "Service") provided by VanguardFX Studio ("we", "our", "us"). By installing, activating or using any part of the Service, you agree to these Terms.

If you do not agree, do not install or use the Service. If you are accepting these Terms for a company or other organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

2. The Software

VanguardFX Studio publishes three plugins for Autodesk 3ds Max 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027:

• VanguardLiquid — GPU fluid simulation (FLIP/APIC and MPM solvers, whitewater, surface meshing).
• VanguardCity — procedural city and building generation.
• VanguardFX DML — audio-reactive animation, also referred to as Audio Reaction.

Each plugin is a separate product, licensed separately. A licence for one does not grant any right to another.

3. Your Licence

Subject to these Terms and to payment of the applicable fee, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to install and use the purchased product. For a 30-day licence that right lasts for the term you have paid for; for a 1-year or 2-year licence it is perpetual, and the term you paid for is the period in which newer builds will activate — see section 5.

The Service is licensed, not sold. We and our licensors retain all right, title and interest in it, including all intellectual property rights. Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership to you.

Unless your invoice says otherwise, a licence is for use by one person on one machine at a time. You may use the output you create with the Service — simulations, caches, meshes, renders, geometry — for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, with no additional royalty owed to us.

4. Plans and What Each One Buys

Every product is sold on the same four terms. A licence is issued for one product and is not interchangeable:

• 7-day trial — free, one per email address per product. The trial runs the complete product; its exports are limited to 40 frames in total.
• 30-day licence — a fixed 30-day term, after which the software stops working. For VanguardLiquid and VanguardCity its exports are limited to 3,000 frames per sequence.
• 1-year licence — a perpetual licence with one year of updates. See section 5.
• 2-year licence — a perpetual licence with two years of updates. See section 5.

The trial exists so that you can find out whether the product works on your hardware and in your pipeline before you pay. We encourage you to use it fully. It withholds no feature and adds no watermark. For VanguardLiquid and VanguardCity one limit applies: a trial may export 40 frames in total, counted across every export and every session, which is an evaluation allowance and not a production one; and a trial that has never exported must be able to reach vanguardfx.pro once before its first export, so a machine that cannot reach us cannot begin exporting. VanguardFX DML has no export limit. Trials are limited to one per email address per product; creating additional accounts to obtain further trials is a breach of these Terms.

Prices are shown on the product page and in your customer panel at the time of purchase, in US dollars, and are the prices that apply to your order.

5. What Happens When a Licence Ends

This section describes real behaviour of the software, and we set it out plainly because it affects what you are buying.

• Trial and 30-day licence: the software stops working at the end of the term.
• 1-year and 2-year licences: the build you are running keeps working after the term ends. What stops is your entitlement to newer builds: a version released after your term expired will not activate under that licence.

In other words, a 1-year or 2-year licence buys you a year or two of updates, and the software you already have does not switch itself off when that period is over. We consider this the fair reading of what you paid for, and we do not intend to change it to your disadvantage.

A licence is issued for a fixed term and is validated against the term recorded in it. Installing a newer version of the software never extends, shortens or alters the term of a licence you already hold.

6. Hardware Binding and Resets

Each licence is bound to a hardware identifier ("HWID") generated on the machine where it is activated. This is how we keep a single licence to a single machine.

If you replace or substantially change your machine, contact support and we will reset the binding. We do this as a matter of course for genuine hardware changes. We may decline repeated reset requests that appear intended to run one licence on several machines.

7. Restrictions

You may not:

• copy, distribute, resell, rent, lease, lend, sublicense or host the Service for others;
• share your licence key, licence file or account credentials with anyone else;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Service, or attempt to derive its source code, except to the extent that this restriction is expressly prohibited by applicable law;
• remove, obscure or alter any copyright, trademark or licensing notice;
• use the Service in breach of any applicable law, or to infringe anyone's rights;
• obtain, or attempt to obtain, more trials than these Terms allow.

8. Circumvention and Enforcement

You may not defeat, bypass, disable or tamper with the licensing, activation or expiry mechanisms of the Service; produce, use or distribute a patch, loader, key generator, emulator or modified build intended to do so; or knowingly use a copy that has been so modified.

Doing any of these things terminates your licence immediately and without notice, and it is also unlawful in most jurisdictions independently of these Terms — both as copyright infringement and under laws prohibiting the circumvention of technological protection measures, including (without limitation) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States and Article 6 of Directive 2001/29/EC in the European Union.

We treat circumvention seriously and pursue it. We reserve every remedy available to us, including injunctive relief, statutory and actual damages, recovery of legal costs, and referral to the appropriate authorities. Where a distributor or reseller acts on our behalf in a territory, it may bring or join such proceedings on our behalf.

The Service records the hardware identifier and licence key used at activation. Where a licence has been shared or a build tampered with, that record is evidence, and we will use it.

If you have found a way around the licensing, we would genuinely rather hear from you than sue you. Write to support and tell us; we do not take action against people who report a flaw to us in good faith and do not exploit or publish it.

9. Payment, Renewal and Taxes

Payment is due in full before a paid licence is issued. Orders placed through our checkout provider are processed by that provider under its own terms; we never see or store your full card details.

Licences do not auto-renew. Nothing is charged to you again unless you place a new order yourself.

Prices exclude any sales tax, VAT, GST or similar charge, and exclude bank, wire or network transfer fees. Where such amounts are due, they are your responsibility unless the law places them on us.

Refunds are governed by our Refund Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

10. Updates and Support

We may release updates, fixes and new versions at our discretion. Your entitlement to them is as described in section 5.

Support is provided in English through the channels listed on our support page. We aim to answer within two business days. Support covers installation, licensing and defects in the Service. It does not include training, scene troubleshooting unrelated to the Service, or work on your project.

11. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or terminate your licence if you materially breach these Terms — in particular sections 7 and 8 — or if payment is reversed, charged back or fails.

On termination you must stop using the Service and remove it from your machines. Sections 8, 12, 13, 15 and 16 survive termination. Work you have already produced with the Service remains yours.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will meet your requirements, or that defects will be corrected. GPU simulation depends on your hardware, drivers and scene; results vary between machines. This is exactly what the free trial is for: please satisfy yourself that the product works for you before you pay.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any right you have as a consumer that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost simulation caches or missed deadlines, arising out of or relating to the Service, however caused and on any theory of liability.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the licence in question in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Please keep your own backups. Simulation caches can be large and are regenerable; we cannot restore your work.

14. Third-Party Software

The Service is a plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max and requires a valid, separately licensed installation of it. It uses NVIDIA CUDA and requires a compatible NVIDIA GPU and driver. Autodesk and NVIDIA are not affiliated with us and do not endorse the Service. Their software is governed by their own terms.

We are not responsible for third-party software, hardware or drivers, or for changes to them that affect the Service.

15. Governing Law and Export Compliance

These Terms are governed by the laws applicable at our principal place of business, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and you agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts there — except that we may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect our intellectual property, and except where mandatory consumer law gives you the right to bring proceedings where you live.

You confirm that you are not located in, and are not acting on behalf of anyone in, a country or on a list subject to sanctions or export restrictions that would make supplying the Service to you unlawful, and that you will not export or re-export the Service in breach of such rules.

16. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms. The "last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version. Changes apply from the date they are posted and do not apply retroactively to a licence you already hold. If a change materially reduces your rights, it will not affect the term of a licence you bought before it.

17. Contact

Questions about these Terms: vanguardfx.pro/support.