This technique works very well for textures - ie repeated patterns used to cover 3d objects. The demoscene uses them extensively to get amazing 3d demos to fit in 64k; since no actual 'textures' are stored, only equations to generate those textures, the amount of data required to display them is drastically reduced.
This system has the pleasant side effect of meaning that since the entire thing, assuming we're still talking about demos, is generated using equations only, there is in fact no upper resolution limit - with a sufficiently powerful computer and a good demo, the demo could be displayed at very high resolution with no pixelation of textures or blockiness of models, though after a certain point the models would start needing more data to describe them in order to look decent (curves would begin to show their component lines; smoothing only works so far) though if you used mathematically generated curves in the first place you could get to extremely high resolution without needing to add data.