Rich, definitely a command dialogue interface..
I am a newbie to rendering so forgive my naivety.
OK So I went to the official maxwell forums and found out that the easiest way to automate a series of renderings through the maxwell software is via a simple script..
Point 5 on http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mxdocsv3/SketchUp+FAQs?_ga=1.169530145.1813411637.1480071096
Script is pasted into the script dialogue box and let to run.. Hey presto! I can't believe I stayed awake all night to manually start each render!