Add to ORKGThe growing power of graphics processing units (GPU) in mainstream computers creates a need for a higher quality and complexity of virtual scenes. Managing this complexity for natural objects such as trees or grass fields or even animals is painstaking, due to the large amount of small objects decorating their surface. The diversity of such details, mandatory for realistic rendering of natural objects, translates in a longer authoring time, a higher memory requirement and a more complex evaluation. We review in this thesis the related works on data representations and on-the-fly generation methods used for the creation and real-time rendering of details over large surfaces. We focus our study on the particular case of grass fields and fur :...