UV Mapping with Materials

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’ve learned how to UV Map an object and edit the map in Gimp everything works great. But is there a way to take materials that I’ve applied to a mesh and then have those materials automatically be applied to the UV Map? Is there a plugin for this, or does it just not work that way?

TIA.

2

if you want to create the materials into a image, you have to bake it! Many tutes on youtube.