Getting these super weird results on my ambient occlusion bake - my displace bake is fine, I don't know what to try or do next...?
Are your hands mirrored? If so, the bake is calculating each hand separately while trying to project the data on to the same UV island. So you're getting both sets of bake data fighting itself. Delete one hand (or disable the mirror modifier) and try baking again.
Once you get a clean bake, you can simple re-mirror the hand geo.
I tried that- I don't see any mirror modifier and when I go to assign just a single hand to the UV layout both still show up on the UV/Image editor even though only one is selected.
Yes... I'm still very new to Blender how do I do that? Sorry about this.
No worries, it's not very intuitive. You need to host your file on the internet somewhere, like dropbox.com for example. Most people have an account there by now, but there's box.com, google drive, etc that serve the same purpose. Once you upload your .blend file there, you can copy the link to download that file and paste it here.
Thanks for your help : https://www.dropbox.com/s/rlphktcbhe0jfph/pancakeHobo.blend?dl=0
ccortniesierra Thanks for the file! It stumps me a bit why the result is happening. The only way I got a successful bake was after disabling "Bake from Multi-res" in the bake settings. If you disable that and set your multires modifier's preview level to the highest (3 in this case) you'll get a clean bake from the highest resolution of detail.