Funny you should ask! Yes, it can be done. I've built something like this recently...my goal was to make programmatic videos of chat conversations. Here's an example[0]. This was rendered totally headless (no launching blender UI) and the input file was a json document that was generated programmatically. I'm in the process of containerizing it so it can be run serverless in the cloud, driven by a job queue.
I currently run blender in a docker container headless on google cloud run. I generate 3D model and render animations of them. Here is one I did today:
You've just blown my mind! Wow, this is something I'll spend my next 3 months before summer definitely. Thanks for the inspiration and showing the possibilities, the headless part is just icing on top.
Each text bubble is duplicated from a rigged template speech bubble. The rig controls the dimensions of the bubble based on the size of the text it contains. Drivers are heavily used on the bones to coordinate them with other bones and movement.
Each bubble is parented to a screen object which scrolls upwards, but the parenting is dynamic, so that it only engages when the message has been "sent".
The "typewriter effect" of each bubble is not keyframed (unsupported) but handled by a frame update callback. The typing is determined in advance with random jitters to emulate a person typing.
Hope that explains it! I have considered sharing the framework, but I know I will get a lot of requests that I'm not prepared to handle unless I was receiving donations.
0. https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/arwmoffat.com/hn.mp4