You can bake a variety of surface attributes into image files or vertex color properties. For example, you can bake complex blended texture, lighting, and bump-map information into a single surface color map, or create the kind of normal and tangent maps that are used to create details for games.
Rendermapping the hand shown on the left allows you to produce, among other maps, the surface color map shown.
For information about using maps to transfer surfaces attributes between objects, for example from a high-resolution object to a low one, see Transferring Surface Attributes (Ultimapper).