Image Generation

Presentational pictures can be characterized by the fact that they are generally produced well in advance of being exhibited to an end-user. For example, a painter’s work is almost always first shown a long time after he or she has completed it, and the same is true for motion pictures. Computer with high-quality raster images have generally also followed this scheme of things, as the rendering has taken too long to be done while the user waits. Where rendering can be sped up to near real time, the computer itself must take on in this case the difficult task of deciding which piece of graphics will be presented next to the user, as there is no longer the opportunity for a human designer to be involved in every detail. Roughly speaking, it is this task that we refer to as image generation.