Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 25, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
According to Pixar, Tractor 2.0 significantly expanded Tractor’s render-farm queueing system and deepens the underlying platform so that new management tools are supported. An advanced API and data features are also to be added, allowing customers to integrate the tool better into the pipeline.
New features include a comprehensive improvement to the user interface, an optimised installation process, improved command-line and scripting interfaces, and flexible resource-sharing controls for maximum utilisation.
Tractor 2.0 consists of three components: the Engine, the Command Execution Server Blade, which runs on each network compute node, and the Dashboard web app, in which artists can see their "Jobs in Progress" and administrators can manage the tasks. The Tractor Engine is compatible with 64-bit Mac OSX from version 10.5 and Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. Tractor Blade is supported by 64-bit Mac OSX, Linux and Windows 7 and 8, while Tractor Dashboard supports all common HTML5-compliant web browsers. According to Pixar, no platform-specific plug-ins are required to use the web-based user interface. Pixar intends to release Tractor 2.0 in the first week of September.
RenderMan Studio already includes a Tractor licence to enable projects to be sent directly from Maya for rendering. A Tractor licence is available for 100 US dollars, while Tractor Annual Maintenance costs 20 US dollars per year. For anyone who does not yet have a RenderMan licence, it is available for 495 US dollars; RenderMan Annual Maintenance costs 200 US dollars per licence. Pixar also offers a free RenderMan version for non-commercial jobs, which is expected to appear with the upcoming release of the renderer.
All further information about Tractor from Pixar can be found here.
