TractorDispatcher

Dispatches tasks by spooling them to a renderfarm managed by Pixar’s Tractor software.

This dispatcher deliberately provides a very simple one-to-one mapping between Gaffer’s nodes and plugs and Tractor’s Tasks and attributes. This can be customised on a site-by-site basis with user defaults and expressions for the plugs, or for more complete control, with TractorDispatcher.preSpoolSignal().

user

Container for user-defined plugs. Nodes should never make their own plugs here, so users are free to do as they wish.

preTasks

Input connections to upstream nodes which must be executed before this node.

postTasks

Input connections to nodes which must be executed after this node, but which don’t need to be executed before downstream nodes.

task

Output connections to downstream nodes which must not be executed until after this node.

dispatcher

Container for custom plugs which dispatchers use to control their behaviour.

dispatcher.batchSize

Maximum number of frames to batch together when dispatching tasks. If the node requires sequence execution batchSize will be ignored.

dispatcher.immediate

Causes this node to be executed immediately upon dispatch, rather than have its execution be scheduled normally by the dispatcher. For instance, when using the LocalDispatcher, the node will be executed immediately in the dispatching process and not in a background process as usual.

When a node is made immediate, all upstream nodes are automatically considered to be immediate too, regardless of their settings.

dispatcher.tractor

Settings that control how tasks are dispatched to Tractor.

dispatcher.tractor.service

A Tractor “service key expression” used to select blades on which tasks will be executed.

dispatcher.tractor.tags

A space separated list of tags that can be used with Tractor’s limits to constrain the number of concurrent tasks. Typically this is used to ensure that tasks using commercial software do not exceed the available license count.

tasks

The tasks to be executed by this dispatcher.

framesMode

Determines the active frame range to be dispatched as follows :

CurrentFrame dispatches the current frame only, as specified by the ${frame} context variable.
FullRange uses the full frame range as specified by the ${frameRange:start} and ${frameRange:end} context variables.
CustomRange uses a user defined range, as specified by the frameRange plug.

frameRange

The frame range to be used when framesMode is “CustomRange”.

jobName

A descriptive name for the job.

jobsDirectory

A directory to store temporary files used by the dispatcher.

service

A Tractor “service key expression” used to select blades on which tasks will be executed. The default value matches all blades. Typically this default is sufficient for the job itself, but more restrictive values may be needed for the dispatcher.tractor.service plugs on each dispatched node.

envKey

An arbitrary key passed to the remote Tractor blade, to be used by environment handlers which configure the way the blade launches commands.