Is there a way to Render target geometry in Maya directly to a texture output

Question

I need a solution to output a collection of geometry to texture in Maya. Ideally, this is a way to get real-time flat facial features on a rig similar to those in the Lego movie or the Playmobil films. There is a really good talk here( PlaymobilFaceSystem ), that details a method, but I just don't have enough experience with OpenMaya in Python to figure it out effectively.

So far I have found this code that writes the image buffer to file, but can't figure out how to get it to send to the texture manager:

#Import api modules
import maya.api.OpenMaya as api
import maya.api.OpenMayaUI as apiUI
import maya.api.OpenMayaRender as omr

#Grab the last active 3d viewport
view = apiUI.M3dView.active3dView()

#read the color buffer from the view, and save the MImage to disk
image = api.MImage()
texture = omr.MTexture()
#view.readColorBuffer(image, True)     #Doesn't work because of viewport2 
if view.getRendererName() == view.kViewport2Renderer:      
    image.create(view.portWidth(), view.portHeight(), 4, api.MImage.kFloat)
    view.readColorBuffer(image,True)
    #image.convertPixelFormat(api.MImage.kByte)
    print "viewPort2"
else:
    view.readColorBuffer(image)
    print "old viewport !"
image.writeToFile('F:/test.png', 'png')