Pixar Tractor Deployment
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Pixar's Tractor render management tool is often installed and used alongside Pixar's RenderMan production renderer on Linux based headless render nodes.
https://renderman.pixar.com/tractor
A tractor license entitlement is often provided with RenderMan commercial licenses. This is defined as a "FeatureInfo" block in your Pixar.license file:
<FeatureInfo>
<FeatureName>Tractor</FeatureName>
<FeatureVersion>2.000</FeatureVersion>
<ExpirationDate>22-jul-2023</ExpirationDate>
<FeatureCount>10</FeatureCount>
<FeatureCode>...</FeatureCode>
<ExtraData></ExtraData>
</FeatureInfo>
Tractor is also available separately as a standalone offering which can be purchased with maintenance from the Pixar RenderMan team sales staff.
Controlling Tractor¶
Controlling Tractor
Tractor can be controlled from a WebUI, as well as from a terminal based command-line session, or Python scripting.
Tractor and macOS Port Ranges¶
Tractor and macOS Port Ranges
When running Tractor Blade on macOS systems it is important to change the default port number from trying to open a new connection to port 80. A popular alternative port number to use is 8080.
For compatibility reasons, a higher port range number has to be defined manually in the Tractor preference files to avoid Tractor communication messages being blocked by the macOS network rules.
The command-line syntax to start a Tractor Blade engine on port 8080 is:
# Start Tractor Blade
/opt/pixar/Tractor-2.4/bin/tractor-blade --engine=tractor-engine:8080 &