Hybrid virtual/real guitar setup

So I got to try something super fun tonight that my fellow Sonarites may want to try out...or maybe everyone but me has already been doing it and I'm just super late. If so, move along folks, nothing to see here :)
 
I picked up a Little Labs Redeye reamp/DI box and I found something that I'm having a ton of fun with. First off though, if you're not familiar, the re-amping box allows you to plug a guitar into one jack, an amp into another, and a preamp into a third and the signal will go from guitar to amp, but also send a clean signal to a pre-amp for recording. There is also a fourth jack on it that you can plug an output of your sound card into. The box let's you record amps with mics like normal but also get a clean signal into Sonar. Once you have the clean signal the idea is to run it through an amp sim or, better yet, go out of your sound card and into that fourth jack on the Redeye and from there out to amps or whatnot (the Redeye changes the signal to be suitable for an amp). There are some other boxes that do this too, notably by Radial, so don't get too hung up on the Redeye.
 
So this is all useful and cool, but today I got an idea. I have a guitar and a Peavey Classic 30 in front of me, but I've never been a guitar gearhead so I don't really have pedals and whatnot. I do, however have a bunch of guitar amp sims that have stompbox emulations and a FCB1010 foot controller. So I went into the plugin menu and told Sonar to configure Amplitube as a synth (I'll tell you why in a second), dropped it into an audio track, removed all the amp and speaker emulations and just put in a bunch of pedals. I then plugged my Les Paul into the DI on a preamp and set the input of my audio track to that pre. After that, set the output of that track to the output on my converter that goes to the previously mentioned fourth jack on the Redeye which sends signal to my amp. Enable input monitoring et voila! I have a whole pedal rack in my computer that is feeding my actual real-world physical amplifier. Signal chain looks like this:

Guitar --> DI --> Sound card input --> Sonar and stompboxes in Amp Sim --> Sound card output --> Redeye reamp box --> guitar amplifier

Now here's the funner part. I exposed the bypass switches on the virtual stompboxes as automation parameters. Then in Sonars synth rack I remote controlled those automation parameters with my FCB and I can now control the bypass on each pedal with a button on the floorboard, just like they were real pedals (that's why I configured Amplitube as a synth earlier, VST fx cannot accept MIDI in Sonar). Similar process with a wah and volume pedal and I have a whole realtime performance rig. Now, drop a 57 and a 421 in front of the amp, an 87 a few feet away and I can record the amp just like any other purely physical amp.
 
The cool part is that this is kinda a hybrid setup...it's not a purely virtual amp, mic and room. Rather it uses virtual elements as part of a physical, traditional guitar setup. Now I get the flexibility of virtual effects but the sound of an amp in a room with mics. Further, you should be able to do this with any amp sim, including TH2 or Guitar Rig.
 
Anyway, it's super fun, really useful and sounds great so I thought I'd share.
Dean
 
P.S. Here's what it looks like (yeah, I know, the 87 isn't plugged in...took me 10 minutes to figure out why it wan't getting signal to the pre...some days I'm smart, some days not so much):