What began as an interesting artistic exercise is now an indispensable tool. It's notable that twenty years after putting its first pixels on the screen RenderMan remains the benchmark for all rendering technology. George Lucas
Chairman of Lucas Film |
What's Tractor?
Tractor is Pixar's distributed processing solution for rendering and other network intensive applications. Derived from years of experience in managing the demands of the worlds largest render farms, Tractor is specifically engineered to address the extreme scalability and performance requirements of today's multi-core networks. Tractor's queuing engine is capable of dispatching over 500 tasks per second. Tractor utilizes proven, open web standards and is highly customizable. Systems administrators can easily add Python extension modules to Tractor-Blades and customize the specifics of how various tasks are executed. Functionally, Tractor consists of three components:
Full Integration with RenderMan RenderMan Studio includes out-of-box support for Tractor to facilitate job submissions directly from a session of Maya. Submit jobs locally or remotely, and monitor them with Tractor's Dashboard. For more information check out the Tractor workflow with RMS. Tractor 2 Highlights
System RequirementsTractor 2 is packaged as a single download for each operating system, containing all of the Tractor 2 components you will need, though each machine may only use a subset: 1) Tractor-Engine Central job queue, installed on one host only Linux 64-bit (gcc4.4), Mac OS X (10.8+) 2) Tractor-Blade Task execution server, on render blades Based on Python 2.7, for: Linux-64, Mac OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+. 3) Tractor-Dashboard Web-based user interface, job browsing and control Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE11. No platform-specific plug-ins required 4) Tractor-Spooler, and Tractor-Query Job submission and advanced command line tools, on user workstations Based on Python 2.7, for: Linux-64, Mac OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+. |