Not much has happened since last update, I found a plugin for Maya which makes it possible to map a normal map to objects, which gives some interesting results. It's also software rendered, which takes me another step away from Mental Ray and HDRI. Which I think is good, if I can get good results with fake GI and normal mapping to speed up rendering time.

NormalBump2D for Maya7.0 1.0.0

I've also looked into greeble possibilities for Maya, haven't found anyhing good enough though, which is a shame. I might attempt making a script for it myself. Though I've found a good workflow in creating "greeble" textures in Photoshop and converting them into paths for Maya.