I can't remember if I asked this before, but if you have the non-character assets (I'm assuming things like the house are commercial models), have you thought about setting up the scenes in Daz with the base model (e.g. G8F or Victoria 8 or whatever) and get all of the character positioning, facial expressions, lighting, etc. figured out for each scene, so that whenever you finally get the character assets back, you can drop the real model in, copy the pose from the mock, and start rendering?