T3D is a flexible software-only Perl-based 3D rendering system that I wrote a few years ago. At this point, it's more of a historical curiosity than something anyone would want to work with or emulate. Still, I learned quite a bit while working on it, and some of those hard-won lessons are documented below. If you're interested in an actively maintained Perl 3D engine, see PIGGE instead.

I originally designed T3D out of frustration with current rendering systems, which seemed unnecessarily optimized to either end of a scale ranging from fast and crude to slow and film-quality. I aimed for a design that could handle the full range from realtime gaming on a single CPU to hyperrealistic rendering using networked multiprocessor computers. Additionally, I planned to do as much as possible of this entirely in Perl! Sadly, my stock of tuits ran out before T3D reached a releaseable state, and by then the 3D graphics world had changed considerably . . . .

Overview

Here I describe some of the concepts that shaped the T3D design, and the implementation advantages gained by its architecture.

Progress Log

As I worked on T3D, I broke the progress into a set of steps, not unlike the builds or revisions used in the industry at large. (At the time, I didn't have access to a source control tool based on atomic revisions, so I did it by hand.) After completing each step I took a snapshot of the source tree, and annotated it with a general commentary of what I changed and what problems were still ahead; this is a (somewhat edited) compilation of the commentaries, with occasional links to rendered images. Unfortunately, this version of the log cuts off perhaps halfway through the history, and I have not taken the time to find the missing logs and merge them in.

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Anything sent to this address will get to me, marked as being in reference to the T3D engine.