This tutorial covers the basics of how to setup and bake ambient occlusion maps in Maya 8 with a focus on game-art. The process is similar for previous versions of Maya only the menu names will be different.

If you have scene that is very static (camera flying trough environment), you can render ambient occlusion to texture and assign that texture to the ambient attribute of your shaders. That way, the scene will render very fast.

This tutorial will describe a procedure to keep your original tiling and resolution for color textures, and bake illumination at a minimum resolution, so that the baking process won't take ages.

Last time, CreativeCOW leader Mylenium showed you how to texture your logo. So far, modo is more or less just a modeler with a built-in renderer for still images.

Baking Ambient Occlusion Using Mental Ray