Thank you very much. I learned quite a bit about certain materials through this project, especially in regard to how Corona handles reflection color and refraction/translucency maps. I think in future projects, I'll nail down some better worn wood materials, but the polycarbonate was surprisingly simple. I used an IOR of 1.58, and a some hand-painted smudge/scratch/normals maps created in 3dCoat, and let Corona work it's magic. I did use Ddo for some of the imperfections on the hand plane, but most of the scratches were painted with photoshop brushes in 3Dcoat.
The wood chips and debris was done mostly with Corona scatter. I placed some standard plane primitives around the scene, on top of some of the other objects, using Autogrid for placement in Max. The planes ranged in size and segment number, and served only as the distribution objects for the Corona Scatter. I also applied variation in scale and rotation through the Corona Scatter tool parameters. There were 10 different pieces of debris used as scatter objects; each piece modeled with poly techniques and modifiers slightly differently, and each contained a slight variation in texture color. Then I used some Maxscript, which is very similar to the "Select and Place" tool in 3dsmax 2015 to manually place more debris where I wanted it, by hand, around the scene, and on top of object surfaces.
At first, I did attempt to use Pflow to scatter the debris, but workflow in the viewport was not as comfortable, and my system began to slow quickly, unless I only showed a fraction of them in viewport. With Corona scatter, I was able to maintain 100% of the 80,000 + instances visible as Pre-Viz boxes in the viewport, while I modeled more of the scene, which helped with placement and intersections.
