I was thinking about this the other day. I like what you can get out of Iclone but I often feel like I've been cheated when it comes to Indigo Render because it's not really good for Animation the way that they have it set up. It occurs to me that the reason I was so down on it, was that as soon as I hit the render button, off Iclone goes and I'm stuck watching it crunch scene after scene after scene in order for indigo to be able to crunch each scene file and send it back image by image. It occurs to me that if it took a page from production pipelines, it might not be such a bad thing to have. 

I'm not even talking about re-inventing the wheel. What I'm talking about is being able to send the animation to a render box, so you can keep working while it crunches the data. It seems to me if you were able to send a scene to a stripped down version of Iclone on another box along with Indigo, you could let it crunch scene files while you work on the next scene. I got the idea from Iray server and Team Render in Cinema 4D. Having a render server can make it really easy to keep working while a second machine is crunching. You give the user a status window they can dock or float somewhere and then they can load the next scene and start work on that. When your render box is finished, it returns the finished movie to a designated spot where you can watch it. Some of this may be rendered moot by the upcoming PBR system, but I think it might be workable for a single animator.

Network rendering has been in the full version of Indigo (not RT) since ages. I'm not sure you can use the full version with iClone though? 

Network Rendering isn't available in RT but what I'm talking about it is actually doable right now --you'd just have to pass the machine to another computer manually and then start it to rendering. What I am talking about is being able to pass a scene that's ready to render to another computer or laptop from inside the Iclone app instead.

Think of it this way:

Your workstation:
Iclone 6 pro
3Dxchange 6 pipeline/pro

Render Box
Iclone 6 Pro
Indigo Render

You do your work on your workstation. When you're finished with your scene and ready to render it, you can export the scene and then copy it over to your render box, open it up and then start the render, while you go back to your machine and start working on the next scene. All of this you can do right now manually, but it would be a nice improvement to the plugin to be able to designate a render box, designate the shared folder for the scene to transfer to, designate a folder on the render machine to save the scene file, then designate a folder to export the finished image sequence. Once the render is done, you can either save the render file on the render box as a take, or delete it. In the mean time, on your workstation, you would have a little status window that tells you when everything is done and ready to look at. 

Realistically, all you're looking at is the purchase of a second iclone pro license and instead of installing Indigo RT on your workstation, you install it only on your render box. So in order to run in this configuration you're spending another 119 bucks for the license, and having to do a little manual labor. I'm thinking that rather than do all that manually, the plugin on your workstation should have a mode to pass all that information to your render box and all that you would see is the status of the render taking place in a little ticker or a web interface or something like that. I'm really not looking at trying to set up a render farm --two computers is manageable for a single person studio. You don't even really need to have a super awesome render box like that. Like I said, you can do it manually but it would be awesome to have a plugin that could pass all of the information and take the guesswork out of how to set it up. 

 I'm basically just a guy in his garage with this, but a setup like this could be a real time saver when it comes to producing your content, and it would go a long way towards addressing some folks concerns about how slow it is to work with when it's not tying up your main machine. 

As a matter of fact, I just put it in the feedback tracker for those who are interested in it.

http://www.reallusion.com/FeedBackTracker/Issue/Allow-the-plugin-to-send-a-scene-to-a-separate-Indigo-Render-Box