Hello! I want to do an optimization of an object made out of polygons -- I''ve heard there are tools that transform the object to a bitmap. Does someone know anything about that?

I think that you´d find rather useful the work of Manuel Oliveira et alt. on relief textures (some kind of Image Based Rendering) that lets you get high quality renderings using low-polygon-count models, and it basically works with pre-rendered snapshots of high-polygon-count models. It was published on SIGGRAPH 2000 proccedings, but the whole paper is avaible at the UNC site: http://www.cs.unc.edu