whenever i ao bake my uv it gives me odd looking artifacts on some edges
here are my settings:
is there a way to have the bake become more like the bakes are in 3ds max?
kind of like “method 2” in this page: http://www.laurenscorijn.com/articles/ambient-occlusion-baking
Yes, there is.
Set Gather Sampling to something more meaningful than 0 Passes and make sure your geometry is canonically using quads instead of n-gons.
thanks, that really helped. most of them are gone, but it looks very white now and its hard to notice where some of the bolts are when viewed from some sides.
is there a way to make all the geometry more noticeable from all sides?
Why are you baking Full Render? You should bake Ambient Occlusion 
Stan’s ‘ne glaz da almaz’ got you! Sure, you need to bake AO only!
Still…
Probably due to us having Cycles AO Shader and different refactoring operations, looks like baked AO on 2.67 has gotten ‘bleached out’ compared to what it was on 2.49. Of course it (2.49, not AO baking) can’t take mesh with n-gons and to be able to see faces, objects need to be saved using “Legacy” option on t-panel (export as .obj can be used also), but it still can be used to bake AO. Of course, be prepared to use favorite image editor to blur out AA and do some other corrections (confusedly looking for a smilie depicting anything resembling venom spitting snake)…