How to bake a texture to its UV-mapped texture. This can be used to emulate the effects of lightening, texturing and other effects to make your object look as it dose in a render inside blenders game engine. These UV textures can also be exported with the model and be used in 3d games made with other applications as well.
In this one, you'll find something that will free you from about 11 useless render hours. You only need to calculate the shadow once, instead of every frame. (That is, if your mesh is not moving...)