I don't know exactly on what renderman you think, but here is my basic workflow with pixar rat and maya... (and I am not an expert
🙂first you have to subdivide your low poly, I use pixar's subdivision scheme, but I suppose you can get the same results using maya's, or just smoothing your poly mesh, however I prefer the first way. I use catmull'n'clark subd's scheme.
After that make an ensemble node and plug surface and displacement shader in appropriate slots. Simple displacement will do the job, but you can play also with combined. Plug the file into the displacement (be sure to use txmake comm. to convert tiff to pixar's tex format), set the channels u want to use, and filtering (radial-bspline is optimized for displacement maps they say). Adjust displacement bounds in displacement shader, adjust kb attribute (displacement strength), attach ensemble to your geometry and voila... it should work... Personally I found values between .5 and 1 for kb working in most cases, but you will have to experiment with that...
here is the sample of something I am working on:
http://djordje.petrovic.googlepages.com/pic_01.jpgfor mudbox baker settings, well I use 32bit float maps (tiff) with
keep zero as midd gray OFF, everything else is on default, but I attached capture of baker window in case you need it...
http://djordje.petrovic.googlepages.com/baker.jpghope this helped a bit.
good luck
dj.