What are Procedural Graphics?

The basic idea is to create, on-the-fly all graphics. Data structures are created and then filled with data generated from the code itself, rather than being loaded from files as above.

Nearly all procedural graphics start with some very small base data. This base data should be as small as possible. The base data forms the seed for the code which then expands it into much larger pieces of data.

Imagine that an object is animated across the screen. We would not store all of the points the object goes to but only some key points. We then use code to generate intermediate points using spline based interpolation or something similar. The key points can be seen as the base data, the spline interpolator as the procedural graphics code and the resulting points the object is draw at as the procedural data generated.

So, procedural graphics has three main parts:

1 Base data, compact as possible.

2 Code that expands the base data.

3 The resulting generated procedural data.