With the release of Maya 2009 the options available for render passes increased tremendously. This is usually a good thing. But in doing so, some of the easy methods for creating custom render passes, such as an Ambient Occlusion pass, no longer work as they did in Maya 2008. Apart from creating your own ambient occlusion shaders and lighting the scene manually the old-school way, this was becoming semi-annoying; I craved the easy way of yore that worked before. So today I bring to you: Jonathan R. Nelson's guide to Easy Ambient Occlusion in Maya 2009, or JRNG:TEAOIM2009 for short.

Follow the link for the complete tutorial:

http://www.jonathanrnelson.com/tutorials/occlusion/occlusion2009.htm