Can you ever generate artifical training and test data?

For instance, suppose I would like to be able to take a photo of a chess game and turn that into a diagram of the position. I have no idea where I would get natural photos of thousands or millions of chess games to use for training and testing a chess piece identifying vision system.

Could I instead make 3D models of common chess set designs, and then generate and render photorealistic images of chess positions to use for training and test data for the vision system?