I want to show the ambient occlusion pass for a breakdown of my scenes in my demo reel. I was wondering what is the work flow for doing ambient occlusion for an entire 3d scene.
I have done it on single objects, but when ever I try to attach my shader to the scene and push render, it all comes out black. I am doing my work in Maya. Anyone have any ideas?

You will have to re-map your scene in a second uv channel to avoid overlapping faces.

http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3lightmap.htm <-- this might help, it's max oriented but the theory is the same.

Give everything in your scene a black material, turn on GI and render out using white lights / environment. tweak the levels in After effects or whatever and it should be kinda close

-N!

Thanks people! God I love this site!

Uh, in maya you just need to make an AO material and assign it to everything, then hit render. You're not doing a render to texture or anything right? So don't worry about the UVs.

Using a GI solution to show a fake breakdown (fake because you're not comping with that layer normally, right?) doesn't seem like a good idea to me.