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