When on-premise hardware is no longer enough to meet a studio's rendering needs, implementing a hybrid workflow may be the best way to manage peak shaving, while still getting the most out of existing resources. While this paper addresses an integration that is specific to Pixar's Tractor, we know that hybrid workflows hold an important place in many pipelines, and are continuing to investigate additional integrations.
The following excerpt from the whitepaper's introduction serves as a brief overview of the content covered:
Conductor ships with a set of plugins to allow artists to directly submit scenes to be rendered on the Conductor platform. This allows users to get up and running very quickly and satisfies the requirements for individual artists or smaller studios.
When looking at larger studios, there is a desire to have artists focus on their specialized tasks. Decisions about where to render need to fall onto render wranglers and production. Artists have very little need to know anything about the render farm at all. Their interest is in submitting the renders and getting the results quickly.
This paper outlines how, on a technical level, to integrate Conductor into Pixar’s Tractor, a popular render farm management system. The goal of this paper is to present a method to integrate Conductor into an existing render farm management system so that studios can maintain their current procedures and policies, sheltering artists from the decisions of the ifs and hows of submitting a job to Conductor.
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