Quote - Wouldn't that be a bit of a single, specific use only thing? Something that would only work with lights in one position relative to the lit object?

Not at all. The crevices, nooks, and crannies exist regardless of lighting. By baking the crevice shadows into the texture, you can skip doing it in the 3D render altogether. For many props, such as an ornately carved piece of wood, baking the AO shadows in is a big time saver.

This image (by Ajax) is a good example.

He generated "dirt" in the crevices using an Ambient_Occlusion node and ray-tracing. However, this is very time consuming. If you could "bake" those dirty areas into the UV-mapped texture, you would never have to use the AO node again on that prop.

The reason this is compelling is that drawing those dirty areas by hand on the texture map in 2D, and getting them in the right places, is excrutiatingly difficult. Worse, if you moved any of those features around a little bit, you'd have to draw the dirt on the texture all over again.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)