Ambient Occlusion

     As I was unwell during the week when our group received the lecture on ambient occlusions I had to catch up on this in my own time. This website http://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/maya/video_tutorial_baking_ambient_occlusion/ambient_occlusion_01.php
was particularly useful when it came to going through the method which is actually fairly simple.
    
     An ambient occlusion applies a shadow effect to the model based on the ambient lighting, this can be applied to a texture map which should give it more depth when applied to a model. The next step for me was to try and apply this to my model.

This image is my model when the ambient occlusion shader is applied. Up to this point it works fine however I am hitting a problem when it comes to batch baking it. I believe, though am not completely certain, that based on the error message given, the problem is with some of the duplicated wheels which maya is "unable to locate".
    As I have spent a large amount of time and multiple attempts on this already I am going to work with my texturing anyway. I will look to fix this problem later on if I have time as I am concerned if I don't progress now I am going to run out of time.