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I am trying to design a game based on procedural level generation from arranging masses of cones, cubes, spheres, etc into pretty arrangements of form and color.

I have learnt a game engine that can pattern 3d models into radial and ordered distributions, recursive loops, and order things prettily, abit like structure synth except explorable sceneries etc. so i can copy most of the forms made with structure synth in the game engine ,fly around them, walk on them, and also so excellent geodesic shapes that look like 100/200 sided polyhedra, but after that i fall abit flat!!!

I really want some kinds of formulas that can make constructions of say 10 000 cubes or cones etc into shapes like we find in mandelbulbs, with ordered and slowly varying angles, sizes and repetetions based upon themes, except only by instantiating, translating, rotating and resizing models in XYZ rather than making a mesh...

I could use some arrays, easy and fun maths formulas, whatever really! thanks any ideas!!!

Very interesting project!

One of the problems with Structure Synth-like objects is, that you will end up with a lot of polygons.

You should consider using a distance field based method for your primitives - you can render all distance estimated fractals and combine them with standard primitives (spheres, cylinders). Geometrical transformations (e.g. twisting) and instancing is very cheap. Here is an example with an infinite number of Mandelbulbs instanced on a plane with different parameters (which runs in real-time on a decent GPU):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/syntopia/6227195447/in/photostream/

The downside is, that it is slightly harder to implement: the rendering and distance estimation must be done on a GPU for realtime speed, while any in-game collision detection and game logic must be done on a CPU.

if you can render a texture in the game engine (real-time) and apply the texture to a simple 3D object, it might solve what Syntopia talks about for collision detection.