Of course it does The way he's doing it, it doesn't even use an ambient pass. Hence it's not "Ambient Occlusion"
Ambient Pass? You gotta be Joking right?
Anyway, in Maya 2010, 2011 and 2012, all you have to do is right click your layer and go to your attributes /presets and select occlusion. It gives you pretty decent fake occlusion without having to use your layers blend mode. You still cant control any attributes like you can for real AO, but it still looks pretty decent.
EDIT: Just found out that this method is actually connected to the mib_Ambient_Occlusion shader. So you can control the attributes.
Last edited by THX1138; 11-02-2012 at 12:05 AM.