Hello,
I've been reading previous posts on forum before posting this.
The general plan I have is to implement radiosity normal maps lightning for my hobby project, but I concentrated on radiosity map baker for a start (so far, only shadow raytracing). I noticed on other lightmaps-related posts that Blender pops up as a good tool for baking lightmaps, especially since it supports radiosity. Since I use custom-built game tool to do level design, meshes objects I get into the game have no point of carrying lightmaps and I'll have to calculate them manually at some map loading/preprocessing stage.
Since I have no idea how Blender fits into this equation, my only guess is that all static geometry is built and arranged in it, but that seems as quite cumbersome production pipeline for level designer to work with??? Game tool I am building is built directly into the game, somewhat similar to Cube engine ideology.
Am I missing something important here?
Edit:
One relatively unrelated question, feel free to point me to existing article: is there a way of serializing Image instance to some recognized file format (tga, png…) without building my own Image2PNG serializer?
You can use Sunflow (http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/) to render lightmaps for you. Just create the code to translate the jme geometry to sunflow objects and set things up. This is what i did at ncsoft to get lightmap generation with radiosity/global illumination into our world building tool…
Allright, when I saw the Sunflow link in some previous posts about lightmaps, I figured its another 3D editor program, not a rendering library 
Thanks a lot, this is going to be huge time saver.
Edit:
Since I presume the code is NCSoft's ownership, could you give me few starting points/hints/pitfall warnings to save me some trouble? I'll try to make transformer some nice component and contribute to JME project (if they want it).
Edit 2:
I've discovered the ideology: I have to specify everything by building ParameterList objects. Its pretty weird approach: instead of using java, I have a feeling I am actually abusing Java and associative arrays to code in some other language.
not many pitfalls. just have to accept the way chris culla has chosen to implement sunflow.
one problem i had was edge bleeding, since sunflow didnt take care of problems occuring from bilinear filtering from the lightmap. this had to be solved with the pull/push method (downsampling in power of two's with only pixels set contributing to the downsamples, and then upsampling, with upsamples only contributing where pixles are not set in the level above).
another thing i did was hack around some things in sunflow itself, so that i could re-render scenes without having to clear and setup the whole scene again…i'll see if i can remember exactly what the problems and solutions were…
I too am VERY intrigued