This is not a tutorial, just a tip I came to think about in this very moment. I'm doing some 3D animation of elements for motion graphics from time to time, and I'm about to do some rendering with ambient occlusion, and then it hit me - most airplanes created in 3D Max, blender, or whatever you guys use, usually have a rather flat texture wrapped around the polygons. What if you baked the ambient occlusion as a texture which can be used as a base layer for shadingon the textured UV? I think it would provide realistic results.