
Check this out http://petershipkov.com/development/SOuP/SOuP.htm (thanks to Peter Shipkov).
"SOuP is a set of plug-ins that extend the procedural (and other) capabilities of Maya.
As you probably know Maya needs more (sophisticated) "live" data generators and modifiers that operate on components lists, objects groups and point attributes. This imposes a lot of limitations when doing more involving things like complex effects, advanced characters and actually quite often geometry manipulations."