I decided that I wanted to try AO on a per material basic, since I read that it is better than using AO on an IBL and wont bring the render to a crawl as bad.  I plugged an AO node into the diffuse color channel and plugged the shader tree into that.  When I rendered the scene, the material with the AO node was snow white.  Obviously I did something wrong =P.  I am using the Unimesh Realism kit by face_off as well on the figure.

Could some kind soul point me in the right direction to do this?  I guess I could always buy a copy of Occlusion Master and have it done automagically too....that is why I have the realism kit, although it would be fun trying to learn to do all of this on my own.....trying to learn 3ds Max on the side too (that's another story in itself).