Automating Studio Workflow

[hjvcan]

Hi All,  I'm looking for a few pointers on how best to create some product renders.

The products are all individual parts/assemblies, I need to set up a couple of environments to display the products in.

(A couple of different angles but 30-50 products and 2 or 3 enviroments)

The past draftsman had created an individual assembly for each product in the environment and then put all of those assemblies into another assembly. 

The top level assembly had the studio camera and lighting details... I have been told he manually created all the renders.

I'm wondering if I should try to reuse the old assemblies or if I should set up a new assembly controlled by LODs and find a way to automate the rendering process. 

(ie make render using LOD: 1 - LOD: 10 all with same camera & lighting setup).

[NAstewart00]

Well depending on your release of your inventor (2011+), if your just planing on doing still renders and not an animation I would just take screen shots of each product using the realistic visual style along with the shadows, reflection, etc and a single color background and switching your application settings to quality. 

Otherwise, if you must animate, I think you would be better off starting fresh. I've found reusing animation files can sometimes get a little heavy (file size).

Nick

[hjvcan]

Thanks for the reply but I think you've missed the part where I want to automate the process.

There is no need for animation, I'm only after still renders. I'd really rather not go down the path of screenshotting all the products. 

I need to create renders for 30-40 different products (these products come in wide range of colous) and each product needs to be shown on it's own and in a typical usage scenario. 

I'm looking for a way to automate the process, step 1 is to automate the renders for the primary view of each product, then I will need to expand that process to render each available colour of all the products, and then do the same with the product shown in a typical usage environment. (instead of just on it's own).

Even just examples of code that deals with inventor studio, or iterating through LOD's/View-Reps would be very helpful.

edit: I'm using an up-to-date IV2013 (PDS) on W7-64