[virtualritz]

In the 90's, texture maps were a luxury for anything. As a result shaders (for offline rendering, realtime shading languages didn't exist yet) were doing everything procedurally.

Here is the only image I could find of the RenderMan Shading Language VIDI SPORTS SHADERS Makina Works sold at the time (you got no source, just bytecode understood by Pixar's implementation at the time, AFAIK):

https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/renderman/S...

What is interesting here is that the shaders did everything on a sphere primitive. All RenderMan implementations at the time (there were more than just Pixar's) were micropolygon renderers. I.e. displacement was almost free in terms of compute overhead.

Even the football operated on a sphere that the shader deformed into the resp. shape. All patterns, stripes etc. were procedurally generated. Each shader had texture slots to apply custom logos.