Maya Transparent Ambient Occlusion and Z Depth with Mental Ray

It's tricky to get textures with alpha channels to show up in AO and Z Depth passes and among the most frustrating issues in some 3d apps. In this quick video tip, I go through exactly how to do this in Maya. We need to create separate render layers (which I will also cover) and manually apply a transparency map on appropriate layered shader nodes to help us get alpha channels to affect AO and ZD. I go through the whole workflow process so take your time and enjoy!