BATCH AND TRACTOR MANAGEMENT

LHABITANT ADRIEN 13 March 2023

INTRODUCTION

At ESMA Toulouse, we currently utilize a render farm powered by Tractor, alongside Renderman as our rendering software. However, the support for Renderman on Tractor within Solaris is currently limited. To address this issue, I have developed multiple tools to facilitate batch launches on Tractor and manage various failures and problems efficiently.

BATCH ON SOLARIS

Actually, we use Solaris to set up the scene and send it to the render farm. However, the first iteration of a window for sending jobs to Tractor with RenderMan on Solaris is not very practical. Firstly, you can only launch one Renderrop for a job, and you can't choose how many frames you want to render for each blade.

In theory, this obliges you to launch a job for each render layer you want to render on the render farm.

With the multiple productions we have, we need to limit the impact on the render farm. So, I managed a way to render multiple layers with the choice of images written on each render blade, utilizing a Euclidean division

I made a little python tool with a list of each shot on the sequence and the possibility to send a job.

The script will create a duplicate of the original scene and rename it with the name of the different layer appended to the scene name. This practice ensures the preservation of the original scene while providing a modified version for rendering specific layers.

This approach helps prevent any potential damage to the original scene and allows for future adjustments to the rendered layers on the render farm.

Additionally, the script will generate TCL scripting containing rendering instructions such as the frame range and the first rendered layer.