Easy Ambient Occlusion on Fur In Maya

So easy you'll slap your head because YOU didn't think of it. This is really a cheat and not really an ambient occlusion, the results are similar so for the most part you'll be okay.

Go to your fur attributes

Drag down all the color sliders to black. The sharpness to 0

Then bring the Ambient Tip Color to white or even go to the choose color dialog box and put in a value higher than 1 in the V channel.

Only thing you should make sure is that the object your fur is on has an ambient occlusion shader on it as well.