Q. Is it possible to start AVS up with NO display in order to generate some pictures without actually displaying anything on the console?

A: Yes, run:

        avs -nodisplay -cli

Then, you can run scripts, etc. which produce images and use the write image module (for example) to dump the images to disk. With the geometry viewer, you can get images directly out of the geometry viewer for archiving. With the Animator, you can dump an image sequence in an encoded format. The animate filename module at the IAC may be used to generate sequences of filenames