Problem to solve: Automatically generating 100 animations using the same animation base, just using a different texture every "pass"
I come from the Adobe world, where things like Automate -> batch or Import -> Variable data sets were there to help me with my repetitive flow. Im a bit of a new user when it comes to Blender, but I do love it so far. I'm stuck in a Blender where I just can't wrap my head around and would appreciate your brain power.
I am trying to create multiple animated showcases for our shirts. We have a shirt body object and would like to change the shirt texture for about 100 shirts and export short animations as movies. The animations are about 200 frames in duration, so we are looking at a total of about 20.000 frames rendered, ideally that would result in 100 separate animation movie files.
Visual flow of the process that I have in mind
I am looking for help on a solution where I could retain my default scene, with all the camera moves, lights and just run either a script, or generate repetitive keyframes with a script, so that each animation can feed of from there. I know that I can replicate this 100 times and define different textures, but its just not developer friendly going forward when we will change the scene and the ambience of it.
So far I've tried feeding the texture as an image sequence How to automate rendering of the same object with different textures? (but that changed my texture on every frame and still didn't get me closer to a solution. I do see how this would be helpful to have a variable data set approach for still images like in photoshop, but I just can't solve it for an animation.
Maybe a solution here is to somehow change the texture to switch on every 100th frame instead on every frame and somehow and loop the keyframed animation 100 times?
I've researched a bit on replacing textures with python, however that would entail running the solution on a local computer since the script has to be feed into the command line and blender renderer called multiple times.
Since 20.000 frames is also quite a bit for my setup, ideally the solution would be baked into the blender file so it can be sent off to a render provider for faster results.