Quote - Earlier I mentioned that the AO Strength parameter does nothing. This is a problem, because sometimes you need to adjust the degree of darkening. Consider the ball and cup - just because the cup blocks some light from the sky, doesn't mean the ball and cup should go completely black. There's still some light bouncing around inside the cup itself, so the ball would be partially lit by the cup.

In the attached image, I show how to make your own strength for the AO. Plug the AO into a Blender as shown, and adjust the darkest shadow you want by changing the Input_1 value to an appropriate shade of gray.

bagginsbill,

How would you set up the above if you have a texture already plugged in to the diffuse color node?  I know you mentioned something about a math node (mulitply) above, but I'm having trouble understanding it written out.  Could you provide a visual?