Pixar has just announced a new render tool designed to replace their current Alfred and Alfserver products, named Tractor. Designed in 3 parts (Engine, Blade, and Dashboard), it is written in Python and designed for both large and small renderfarms with a simple license model of $99 per node.
Tractor’s streamlined design ensures quick deployment, and delivers high performance with a queuing engine capable of dispatching over 500 commands per second. Tractor 1.0 uses proven, open web standards and is highly customizable, for example allowing systems administrators to easily add Python extension modules to Tractor Blades and customize the specifics of how tasks are launched.
Hi, thanks for the post. I just wanted to make a small clarification: of the three components, only Tractor Blade – the remote execution server on each render farm host – is written in python. The central job queue and server assignment engine, Tractor Engine, is written in C++ for performance (recently benchmarked at 920 task launches per second at one site). The UI – Tractor Dashboard – is web based, written on top of the Cappuccino javascript framework. cheers, d.