Tak, I'm by no means an expert in this, but you're right about a couple of things, VRed is wicked expensive if you don't need it for its other features.
I am learning how to work with polygonal modeling, it's very easy to grasp in concept, but just a little harder to be precise (as a beginner at least). I do not really use Rhino (I prefer MoI3D) but I have heard about the UV editor in the program. I believe that could work, however, when you leave Rhino, your export needs to somehow preserve those UVs, and I'm not sure which file type would work best for that. I can tell you, tesselating it into a mesh such as an .OBJ, in general, has not worked for me.
Hope you figure out how to accomplish this, and when you do, please share with us!