Baking

Baking refers to the process of rendering data to the UV layout of an object. A very common usecase is to bake normals from a highpoly mesh to a lowpoly equivalent.

It can also refer to baking out vertexcolors, ambient occlusion, curvature, height or any other attribute to a texture for reuse somewhere else.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking