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.