More baking experiments:

I'm starting to like this whole baking thing. I'm able to generate normals and ambient occlusion that gets ~70 % of my desired look. There's definitely going to be some serious tweaking with color maps, but it's a good start. I tried some experiments with baking my textures onto a slightly higher res model in hopes that it would generate slightly higher quality maps. While this was generally true, it was a bitch to line up the silhouettes of the UV's since there was much less detail on the low-res cage. Nontheless, it may be a good technique to keep in mind for some of those shapes that lose a lot of detail in the bake (the metal rings that hang the heads). Speaking of which, I found that putting a normal map on the rings was actually counter productive and made the model look worse. I'm thinking that I'll probably just make the rings separate objects and create a separate shader as well. This shader will have the usual maps but not the normals.

Anyway, here's a little update on a couple of heads. The colored one is just a quick and dirty ambient map placed on the color channel and the ambient channel, a normal map and a spec map. The one on the far right is just the normals.