procedural graphics

GDC 2019 session where Insomniac's David Santiago describes the procedural systems used to build Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man. It covers the open-world pipeline and how each system was designed to support iteration and dependencies.

Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

A demo of the Symbolics Graphics Division's S-Packages, a Lisp-based 3D color graphics and animation system from the 1980s. It was later used in developing for the Nintendo 64.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

David Rosen of Wolfire Games explains how simple procedural techniques can produce fluid, interactive character animation from very few keyframes. Examples come from Overgrowth, Receiver and Black Shades, from his 2014 GDC session.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a painting using only mathematics in a shader, building it up step by step. The linked Shadertoy source shows the result.

A two-minute explainer of 3D Gaussian Splatting, the rendering technique from a 2023 research paper. It outlines why it could change how 3D graphics are made.

minimme traces the timeline of 3D graphics engines on the Game Boy Advance, from early experiments to commercial 3D games, covering techniques such as voxel rendering. It is a history and showcase of what developers coaxed out of the limited hardware.

A short demo reel of the 1985 Silicon Graphics IRIS 2400 workstation animating flat-shaded polygons on a 68010 CPU. It shows the early SGI graphics that preceded their later fame.

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

Debris by Farbrausch, the winner of the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition. All of its 3D visuals, textures and music come from a single 177 KB executable.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

A recording of .the .product by Farbrausch, the first-place 64k intro at The Party 2000. It fits an 11-minute 3D demo with music into 64 kilobytes.

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.

Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.

A demo of Marble Marcher, a game using a fractal physics engine and fully procedural ray-marched rendering. The player rolls a marble through shifting fractal levels.

A short ShaderToy piece by Martijn Steinrucken (The Art of Code) that renders rain on a windshield during a night drive, with blurred bokeh lights. It is set to music.

The 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.

Kevlin Henney argues that procedural programming never went away despite later paradigms such as OO and functional. He traces the history of structured programming and shows where procedural thinking still lives in modern code and why it matters for readability.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content. He covers procedurally generated content and the ambitions of the game, with gameplay demo starting around 12:30.

Euclideon's 2011 technology preview of Unlimited Detail, a rendering approach claiming unlimited geometric detail in real time via point-cloud style data. The company promised more to come while keeping most work secret.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

A SIGGRAPH 2019 course on geometric algebra. Charles Gunn gives an intro, then Steven De Keninck gives a programmer-focused course with live examples in ganja.js.

Bisqwit builds a Doom or Duke Nukem 3D style software-rendered 3D engine in C from scratch, supporting non-Euclidean geometry. It covers vector rotation and portal rendering with sped-up, tool-assisted coding.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North. He covers the theory, implementation, tooling, and how he blends art and technology.

AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.

A 60fps capture of Future Crew's 1993 MS-DOS demo Second Reality, one of the best-known pieces of the demoscene. It runs about 16 minutes of real-time graphics and music effects on PC hardware of the era.

Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.

The first part of Freya Holmer's three-part, nearly four-hour lecture on shader coding for game devs in Unity. It covers what shaders are, vertex and fragment shaders, interpolators, data types, blending and textures.

A full-day recording of the University of Utah computer science department's 50th anniversary event with panels, keynotes and talks by alumni and pioneers. It includes Ivan Sutherland's presentation on single flux quantum electronics.

Inigo Quilez live-codes the "Happy Jumping" animated scene in a Shadertoy GLSL shader over about six hours. He builds the raymarched character step by step, explaining the math and procedural techniques, with checkpoints linked for each stage.