From my understanding some software programs, like maya can bake a displacement map into a model so it becomes part of the poly model, I am wondering if houdini can do anything like this. I have tried searching google and the help section but not found anything helpful so I apologize if this is a basic question.

The reason I want to do this is that I am making displacement maps based off photos so this would be an easy way to texture an object. thanks for any help.

I don't quite know what you want. I'll guess that you want to take a displacement map and use that to deform some geometry.

Yes you can do that.

See the example file attached for a simple VOP tool that you can copy-paste in to your scene.

Is that what you were after?

Thanks for the help Jeff!