Yes it is a known technique also in 3D games. Related, but more complicated (research) topic is infinite/arbitrarily-sized non-looping texture generation from a

Yes it is a known technique also in 3D games. Related, but more complicated (research) topic is infinite/arbitrarily-sized non-looping texture generation from arbitrary sample images. http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vordonezroma/texturesynth.pdf http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vordonezroma/texturesynth.pdf (There are some mind blowing generated images in the linked PDF.)