Ha, awesome. I couldn't do that on our geometry because it resulted in the lightmap bake picking up the intersecting edges and giving me shadows along the seams.
How it's currently looking like: There's some lightmap issues, and some UV seam LOD issues, but it's getting there. Going to change the throne and do some wall textures.
vertex lighting and lightmaps are older, time intensive methods that are falling out of favor to real time, dynamic lighting. It all depends on what engine you are using.
To be honest the vertex density might be good enough there that you can get away with vertex lighting (lightmap resolution 0) worth experimenting with if you didn't know.
Realtime shadows are where a dynamic light is occluded. You can't have a static light with dynamic shadows, short of storing a different lightmap for every light in the scene!
The only BSP piece is the floor itself...the rest are my meshes. I'm creating a second UV set for the lightmaps..yes it's my first time attending gdc..
the ambient map is mostly used for stuff like lightmaps/GI pass on posed models/environments, it's very slight on characters but really really working well on enviros
I have to use Unity for the project (athought UDK would be more fun). And the only AO I will have will be from the lightmap bake, since it is a modular environment.
Are you working with a lightmap based engine, such as UDK? If so seams are unavoidable. We discussed workarounds for this problem on this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76476