thanks, this will speed up the preparation process, and keep the file lightweight because I won't have to duplicate the geometry for each variant.
Nonetheless I will have to wait for a final version of v5, until the renderfarms have also upgraded to v5.
It wasn't the ideal solution I was hoping for though. I thought maybe I could render each texture to a different multipass layer and then switch on/off in photoshop to save different files, and thus render only one frame... maybe I was unrealistically optimistic about that :-D