Ambient Occlusion and Normal map baking

In order to stay within the poly limit and still maintain a high enough level of detail on the final asset I decided to create a high poly version of the tracks and bake the detail to a low poly mesh in the form of a normal map, above you can see the completed high poly mesh next to a UV mapped low poly mesh exported directly from the main model.

After correctly positioning the two meshes and exporting them as .obj files I loaded them both into a third party application called Xnormals and baked the normal map as shown below.

Finally in order to start texturing I used Maya to bake an ambient occlusion map onto the main model and then used that detail as a layer in a diffuse texture.