Still been working on things, just running into the grind of crunching out some of these renders. Primarily dealing with scenes that were setup with lights and emissive surfaces specifically for iray, and characters I've optimized for 3delight. The good news is, the scenes that require iray I only need to render once. Then I can quickly render the character in various poses/expressions separately and hope that when I paste them into the scene it looks "okay". I'm sure the lack of character shadows will be noticeable, but the other good news is that some of these hurdles are only necessary for some of the initial scenes/story.
While sitting here with little else to do but watch my computer render away, I've thought a lot more about the story and game mechanics. Some great ideas are brewing!