Render overnight

Having a set of images taking a lot of time to render I wondered how to prepare a script to do them all overnight, the proceeding is this one:

1- prepare your scenes in cycas
2- for each start a render and just stop it as soon as it begins
3- before starting another one go to the .cycas3/tmp dir in your home
4- there you'll find a file named cycas.pov, copy it to another dir with another name ie. cycas1.pov
5- do it for each scene.

at this point you will have many files, ie cycas1.pov, cycas2.pov, cycas3.pov and so on in a dir, you will need a script that takes each one and send it to pov with the right options, the script is this one:

#!/bin/bash
povray +Icycas1.pov +FC +W4096 +H3072 +Q9 +R2 +A0.1 +AM2 +O1.tga
povray +Icycas2.pov +FC +W4096 +H3072 +Q9 +R2 +A0.1 +AM2 +O2.tga
povray +Icycas3.pov +FC +W4096 +H3072 +Q9 +R2 +A0.1 +AM2 +O3.tga

the options can vary, +FC is form compressed tga +Q is render quality, +R is the level of recursion +A is antialias, test them for your speed/quality needs, please see povray documentation for a complete list.

as you see resolution antialias and render algorithm are set in the script, all the other parameters have to be set in cycas dialogue (ie ambient light)

Stated that povray now works alone with all your files the best thing to do is to free as match memory you can so he can work better.
There is at this point no need for looking at it so we can tourn off X , Kde, and anything else linux start up for making the desktop environment.
So the best thing to do is to go to a console (ie CTRL+ALR+F2), login as root and then issue an:
init 1
this shuts down quite anything and asks you to login as root, done that became your user with
su - youruser
go to the dir where you have the .pov files and the script and run the script.

when povray has done you can issue a
init 5
as root to return to the graphical environment as you startup.

well, this is for linux, for win it's another story.

enjoy

ciao
luca

p.s.
the attached file renderizza.sh to be used should be made executable with ie
chmod 744 renderizza.sh