You can use MentalRay Batch-Baking if you set up a material on the mesh like this. I hope it makes sense. Btw did you try the Maya.env PYTHONPATH approach ?
somewhat related, a MR shader that does the same: http://www.tomcowland.com/mentalray/tc_curvature/index.html it supports tesselation with barycentric interpolation which results into smoother results if you want to bake or render stuff into bitmaps. Different but also nice: http://www.rpmanager.com/plugins/TensionMod.htm…