Imagine that every time you left your computer untouched for 5 minutes it would start to render one of your .blend files 
… I was thinking allong the lines of a blender screen saver. Didn’t they make one that ran the plugin as a screensaver, well why shouldn’t someone make something like this?
Just thought I’d put that idea out in the open. Anyone know how to do something like this?
So what do YOU think?
WeWa
great idea! but do you mean like render up an image and then show it or just render stuff in the background while showing some other screensaver?
It Renders your pic[s], saves, and then displays it. This way if you were making a movie you could see how far it’s gotten. Maybe make it a option (as in “display progress - on/off”). Render-Display or Display something else while rendering. Of course it would need to be low priority or else you’d never get out of your screen saver…
Adues,
WeWa
You would also need some kind of continue function, I think. Otherwise all progress on unfinished renders would be lost when you stopped the screensaver, which would kinda defeat the purpose, if I understand it correctly (My understanding of the purpose: A way to utilise all free computer time to render huge projects). If not, then it would just be a cool screensaver… which is a good idea in itself. 8)
Some sorta network render daemon/node that would run as the screen saver. This would be very cool in a production environment where people would normally use their systems during business hours. Or this could be used in an educational setting where a lab of computers could all be network render nodes while “sleeping” but could still be used by students.
Then when the student is finished using the system… the screen saver would eventually come back on and connect to the render daemon and away you go again rendering the next frames. Very cool idea I think! I know I’d be interested in using something like this at work and at the community college I teach some classes at.
And as just a screensaver you could also just have it cache some blend files that it has network rendered and use those as the screensaver when no jobs are present.
Well, I’m gonne see what I can do… Think I could use visual basic to make this kind of screen saver? Or should I try it with some other compiler/what-ever-you-call’em? Not that I am any good at programing except on my [lost] ti89…
Adues,
WeWa
With win 2K or XP, you can just start up the command-line rendering system in Blender and then press Ctr-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager. You can then set the Blender process to low priority. If you have enough RAM on the system, you can go about using the computer as if it was not rendering.
I do this all of the time with XP, in fact, it is going right now! This is a lot better than a screen-saver, because it renders using ALL spare CPU power (i.e. it would not be rendering now because I am typeing, but typeing does not use a lot of CPU, so the rendering is sucking off all spare cycles.)
I can even play intense 3D games (or keep on working on a 3D animation) while the computer renders with no notacable slowdown becasue the render is set to a lower priority.
Also, I have my animation dumped out to individual TGA files, so when I want to check on the progress, I just open up my video editor and import the sequence and I can watch how far it has gotten.
Sorry, but your idea seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
wow never thought of using the taskmanager like that… Great idea, thanks. I guess that’s one problem solved (kind of…).
Adues,
WeWa
How do you start the command line render?
blender -h gives you help!
Stefano