Thanks guys. The strobing went away when I turned the reflective switch off. It makes sense since the reflective switch cause the rays to bounce off the surface at an angle rather than along the normals. Also, I turned the max distance up to 300 which gave much better results without occluding the bottom of the model too much. I also played with the spread a bit and finally settled on .9... I messed around with the fall off too just to see what it does but I think that in the end, I left it at 1.

Right now I'm just trying to get comfortable with the mib_amb_occ texture because I have a lot of rendering to do and I want to use it as one of my render layers.

Question: Do you think I should use the occ texture just to generate the occlusions created my the model inself (self occlusion) or should I include all other geometry in the scene in the occlusion? I'm wondering if it is better to do a normal shadow pass for the model to capture the shadows that other geometry in the scene might be casting onto it... I"m not sure I'm stating this correctly. Basically I'm wondering if the model's self occlusion should be one pass and all other shadows on the model should be a seperate pass.