Introduction ///
The demo scene is often regarded as an underground phenomenon. People from all walks of life publish your works on community websites in the hopes of impressing others with their artistic and programming flair. Sometimes, these pieces get noticed by people in the right places and can lead to the creator landing a career. Other times, the artist will simply be pursuing a labor of love.
Demo's are heavily relied upon in the computer graphics industry [especially those created using Virtools] as a way to quickly, cheaply and efficiently demonstrate ideas that have the potential to be implemented in a game, film or other CGI outputs. This tool is not used to create the end product, so much as it is used to simulate mock-ups and rough-cuts that can later be viewed and decided as to whether the idea is worth pursuing.
It is the creation of these real-time 3D visualizations that has become invaluable to the graphics industry because of the relative speed of the creation process. Furthermore, the data obtained pertaining to memory usage and CPU load can often aid in engineering less computational expensive code making the end product available to the many, instead of only those with hi-end gaming rigs.