Ranjit Singh Rana looks at using Maya and Mental Ray to bake out Ambient Occlusion, Color and Light Maps by taking us through the process of setting up and rendering using a character model for the demonstration. Check out the here.

From the tutorial description: In this tutorial you’ll learn how to bake an Ambient Occlusion map, as well as a Color & Light map inside Maya using Mentalray. Ranjit will first guide you through the process of setting up and rendering the AO map using a character model for demonstration. In the second half of the tutorial, we’ll switch over to an interior scene to generate our Light & Color map, also using Mentalray.