Stefaan Lippens' webface

Yesterday I had to render a 3d animation for a colleague working on 3D television. He needed a short street-view video with depth map. Because there were some problems with some real world footage he wanted to use, he asked me to create an artificial video in Blender. After I created a simple scene with some models from www.katorlegaz.com, I wanted to render the whole animation overnight on one of the computers in our lab. I had some trouble with getting the command line arguments right and wanted to share this, in case someone else has the same problem.

I first tried

blender -b -a foo.blend

the option -b is for background mode, so I could log out from the computer after I started the job, the options -a is for (according to the command line help):render frames from start to end (inclusive), only works when used after -b I thought this was the bare minimum to get the job done. However, nothing happened but this:

Compiled with Python version 2.5.
Checking for installed Python... got it!
ERROR: No camera
 
Blender quit

Huh, no camera? There was an active camera, the scene rendered just fine from the UI, I checked my file over and over and everything seemed all right.

Because Drupal wallpapers are considered rare species I decided to jump in and spend some spare time on modeling the druplicon in Blender.

Here are some first shiny renders:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

It's a simple concept, but I already lost a lot of time looking for the solution: changing the active (aka default or just render) camera in Blender. I just can't find any clue in the (context) menus or in the wikified Blender manual. Google directed me to this Blender survival guide in which the solution is concealed:
select the camera which you want to make active and press ctrl + numpad-0