Skeletal Highrise, Model Geometry or use material to fake it. 3ds Max

[nicknack]

Currently I am working on a project that requires a city background. after thinking on this for a while I decided to use greeble to generate a simple city this was fine and my super was happy with the way it looked. However just as I was preparing to render one of the marketing bunnys decided that they wanted skeletal buildings (just the slab and columns of each floor) instead of gray blocks . The solutions I came up with was either model it (not hard but a little time consuming) or try and fake it with a material. Which is going to give a nicer finished product?? will the material option be quicker to render or the model? has anyone had a similar requirement before if so what solution did you use??

[spittle]

Images generally render much faster than geometry. I'd prob still go with modeling unless you have a good background.