Baking Textures In Mental Ray

Does anybody have any experience with this process? Is it really necessary to achieve realistic depth in a model? or is there a better method?

for example, My Lamp post model has a cracked paint on metal texture, however in the crevasses and bevels, no matter what light projection I use, the model still looks very 'CG' for lack of a better phrase.

Is texture baking the way to go, or should I wait until the entire scene is composed before worrying about this?

Thanks guys!