"...someone might decide to use the student/free version of Maya!" Seems fair as long as it's an exercise in seeing what people can come up with and not a "competition." Most of those apps plaster a watermark on the image or limit you to a small image size which would probably discourage their use. You already have drastically different capabilities between P4 and P5.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken