I thought I would share my experience & recommendations with using Visualize Professional to render a SolidWorks Assembly with configurations.
The assembly is fairly simple, but uses circular patterns so there are 18 copies of many of the parts. I have 2 configurations and the only difference is a concrete wall and metal sleeve in one and only the concrete wall (different hole size) in the other.
If I use "monitor file" with automatic part grouping, Visualize brings in the full feature tree, so if I want to change the appearance of one of those patterned parts, I need to update 18 parts. But switching between configurations in SW (and doing a save) prompts Visualize to ask me if I want to re-import the model, which is very helpful.
But I really like Appearance grouping, so my model tree is very short and replacing appearances is a snap. But the "monitor file" option disables the Appearance Grouping option.
So this is my work flow (2017 SP4.1):
1. In SW I assign a DIFFERENT appearance to parts so that they get grouped in Visualize the way I want. Because I wanted to have the two sizes of concrete wall kept separate in Visualize, I copied SW concrete appearance under a new name and applied it to the other concrete part. But the bolt & but have the same appearance so I can treat them as one entity.
2. I created a 3rd configuration in SW ("Combined") that had those 3 unique parts un-suppressed.
3. Exported assembly to Visualize using Export Simple, which does Appearance Grouping.
4. Set up Visualize scene, camera and appearances in the Default configuration.
5. Added 2 new configurations in Visualize to match the original SW configurations. All I needed to do was Hide 2 parts in one and 1 part in the other configuration.
6. Send both configurations to the render queue.
The advantage of this approach is that my Visualize session is independent of SW because I don't have to go back to SW to switch configs and re-save. And I have 1 Visualize project file so all settings get applied to both.
Thanks for sharing this workflow tip, Bill! Really helpful to utilize Configs in both applications as you've described.
Nice images too, by the way.