Matthias Bühler shares a post with some code for creating displacements from meshes in Maya with a bit of MEL scripting. Download the script here.
From deadalvs: “I have created a MEL script which helps to render perfect displacement maps from one or multiple meshes, using the Maya Software renderer. The idea is that the setup is automated and the user does not have to setup everything manually. Please use this script in a separate scene since it may mess up your render settings to fit the geometries to render. [It may happen that the render “focus” is not perfectly fitting the bounding box of the selection, in those cases Maya’s “exactWorldBoundingBox” command fails since some nodes may have still some transformations applied. There’s an extra button to clean those.] Let me know if anyone has an issue or needs additional functionality.”
