Not sure if there is a universal term for this, I just grabbed swizzle since programmers use it to describe how they transform values around into new ones. http://wiki.polycount.com/Swizzle Kinda seems to fit, but is there a better term for this? Texture atlas doesn't really work. For me that means textures packed…
Tor'ing? Frick'ing? He didn't invent it but he did make it popular with his minimalist approach to his Sci-Fi scene. He uses a lot of UV tricks but the entire scene uses 2 256*512 textures and makes good use of this technique.
I seem to remember the green channel of a DXT compressed texture getting some slack cut? And Alpha channels for DXT5 have little compression - but it'd be great to have these tidbits confirmed/denied (though my tests seem to show that what I typed up is correct).