Quote - Is lightmapping anything like texture baking?

Very much so, only with respect to lighting.  It's mainly used in games, architectural walkthroughs or other places that don't need dynamic (moving) lights.  I'd like to use it to bake a light map onto an environmental prop, say a furnished room, and set that object to not cast shadows.  My hope is that I could blend shadow maps created in Gile[s] with shadow maps created at render time by Poser.  In order to look correct though, the Poser shadows shouldn't be any darker than the the light mapped shadows (created by placing lights in the Poser scene similar to the ones placed in Gile[s] before producing the light map).

If I were bagginsbill I'd have dreamed of the nodes in my sleep to make this work, assuming it is indeed possible.  The goal is to cut rendering times by only generating shadows for the figures, while gaining shadow map accuracy of not spreading the shadow map over a large area.  My tests seem to indicate that the shadow map is calculated based on the minimum area needed to cover all objects that are set to cast shadows, so not having the environment casting shadows will allow the shadow maps to calculate faster and also be more defined.