Using version 8.0 and the max distance thing, no I didn't. But then I even without altering that it would have changed the appearance a little wouldn't it?

Maya's in-built help isn't that great. I'll have a look through the mountain of Maya books I own including the 2 by the Maya mountain himself :bow:

If someone could show a step by step > Create a simply Poly sphere > apply whatever is necessary for the Occlusion layer > Show the render setting > Result. I'd greatly appreciate it.

It seems a little odd that Maya's standard preview render is so dark as to be practically useless. For me anyway

I'll stick to poly modeling for now. As I said before rendering my work in Maya is pretty much irrelevant, just nice to show my crew what I'm working on.