Ever since the advent of computer graphics, procedural generation of content has been part of its diverse toolbox. At first, its only field of application was in off-line, software rendering, because CPUs didn’t have enough processing power to render procedural content in real time, and hardware acceleration had its development focus put elsewhere. In recent years, however, we have seen an introduction of massively parallel and programmable graphics hardware with absolutely astoun­ding processing power. This means that procedural methods can now be quite useful even in real time rendering, and there is renewed interest in the field.

The subject is deeply fascinating to me: challenging but rewarding, visually creative in a hands-on manner, and fun. Alongside my academic work in the field, it has been an enjoyable hobby over the years.

It’s not a universal tool, far from it, but it deserves to be considered. Like with all tools, it’s useful to know about its capabilities as well as its limitations so that you can make an informed decision on what to use for a particular task.

This book aims at teaching you how to create procedural content, to give you the clues you need in order to decide when to use procedural methods, and also to know when you are better off leaving this particular creative tool in the drawer.