The recent release of Blender included the ability to bake render information in Cycles. This will be a huge leap forward for creating realtime assets and animation rendering in Blender, bringing the application in line with others.
The BlenderGuru Andrew Price breaks down what baking in rendering is, and offers a great primer for how to start baking in just 3 minutes. Andrew also covers baking render specific items such as caustics and textures objects.
Check out the article providing an introduction to Cycles Baking in blender here.
