Render to Texture

Nice. 
My first attempt at baking lighting into the texture and importing into irrlicht proved to be a success.  I had to wade through way more options and complexity, but that's a good thing.  So designing and lighting my levels in 3ds is looking like the much more likely option right now. 
But I also have to look into irrlicht's .3ds importer code to see if I can mod it to create my Bullet collision objects.  Also I'd like to see if I can embed custom properties into 3ds objects that I can then extract in irrlicht to utilize, such as physics volumes, fog, material props, etc.