I've got a problem that I'd like to throw out there to see what kind of clever solution you might have. I'm rendering sunglasses for a company. They have five frame styles and three lens colors for each style and a four color/texture options. So far that's 60 possible variants to render. Then they have other accessories that they want to render their classes which can put the number into many hundreds. Then there are several lighting setups and camera angles that they want rendered for each combination. How would you render all of this without creating a gigantic mess of a network?

I have the glasses with all options setup as variants so all I need to do to get a new variant is select the particular variant in a set variant node.

What is the best way to do this?

I do quite a lot of these kind of projects for big fashion brands. PDG is brilliant for this, in the most basic setup you create workitems for all the variants using wegdes.

More advanced setups involves checking input/output modifications dates and only redoing stale items and such, submitting jobs to deadline, hooking into review systems etc.

But start with looking into PDG wegdges.

(not in Solaris btw, PDG is simply controlling all the parm values that make the different variants)

This video plus Houdini file may cover your use case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH6sl0gKiyc [www.youtube.com]