Section 8 - Acknowledgements and Future Plans

In this section:

• 8.1 Acknowledgements
• 8.2 Future Plans

8.1 Acknowledgements

This project has been a major undertaking for me. Virtually every component of the system was been re-implemented from scratch at least 3 times before I was happy with it. Even if the finished result might not seem all that earth-shattering to others, I am quite proud of it, and I'd like to thank all of the people who helped me out along the way with ideas and suggestions:

• my supervisor James Stewart, for his ongoing patience and helpful advice
• my co-workers Kelvin Sung, Changyaw Wang, and Andrew Woo on the Alias|wavefront
• Rendering team, for helping to illuminate many of the intricacies of the Maya renderer.
• the designers of the Dependency Graph architecture in Alias|wavefront's Maya product, whose ideas I shamelessly pilfered and bastardized in my entity/attribute abstraction. Jim Craighead in particular is to be thanked for the insight he provided me into Maya's shading architecture.
• Jean-Philippe Doue (with whom I have never communicated), for his algebra3 vector math library, which provided a most valuable starting point for this project.

8.1 Future Plans

As for the future of RenderDude!, I plan to use it as a framework for my thesis research on motion blur. Some of my future implementation plans are:

New Camera Models

• add a distributed ray-tracing camera
• add an A-buffer subpixel scanline rendering camera (this should be far more efficient than the HCM camera while providing the same level of quality, and will also allow me to integrate transparency into the system)

Shading/Texturing Stuff

• add bump-mapping capabilities to my shaders
• add many more interesting procedural textures to the system

Interactive Stuff

• add an OpenGL interactive rendering camera.
• add an OpenGL-based graphical shader network construction program to permit fast construction and visualization of interesting shader networks
• add an OpenGL-based interactive animation curve editor
• The above three components could be combined to form a rudimentary interactive modelling/animation/rendering package based on the RenderDude! architecture

And that's about it.

Ryan Meredith-Jones
December 1998.