Implementing 3D graphics using only mathematical formulas?

Question

I saw these amazing little programs(7kb,64kb) with stuning graphics. I was wondering what technologies they used to implement these ? OpenGL + Assembly ?

Here are the the videos :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfuierUvx1A&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scSsxrMVXh8

Heaven 7 binary :

http://www.scene.org/file.php?file=/parties/2000/mekkasymposium00/in64/h7-final.zip&fileinfo

Conspiracy Binary :

http://conspiracy.hu/release/64k/chaos_theory/

All the textures animations , meshes are generated from mathematical formulas ?

Otherwise how can they be stored in 7kb and 64kb binaries ?

Answer 1

It's the art of the demoscene. Most of the meshes and textures and all other assets are made by procedural graphics.

The point where most demosceners meet themselves is pouet.net, there you can learn a lot or ask any question. As in other competitions, most sources and techniques are treasured by team (demoscene groups), but some tuts might be found like the Ińigo Quilez's strawberry site and DisplayHack blog.

The 64kB or nowadays more common 4kB demos are compressed by kkrunchy and Crinkler tools. These are amazing piece of software, which is full of applied statistics and awesome knowledge of C/Cpp/ASM generated executables.

You might find mode information about demoscene in this particular Demoscene docs videos.