Maps Baking

This feature is really cool. For now, it only works with Blender Render, although Cycles baking is already in development and may arrive in Blender 2.72. Imagine you have lights and shadows in your scene; now you can “bake” that lighting into a texture for the selected object, so you can then load that texture in the object and it will have the lights and shadows projected on it so you can see it in real time!

This is very useful when you want to see an effect in real time while still getting the look of a final render. With this method, you’ll be able to make a scene look like a final render by just displaying a simple texture that already includes light and shadows.

You can also bake details from other objects into the currently selected one. This is used to generate normal maps and displacement maps that you can later use to make the object look like it has a lot more detail than it really does.

Maps baking tools can be found on the Render tab of the Properties Editor.