3D Drawing in Microsoft Office

Updated 4/4/98


In various capacities from 1992 to 1995, Tim Hawkins and I helped design and implement the 3D Drawing functionality present in Microsoft Office. Some early work I did as an intern shipped in Microsoft Word 6.0 in the "WordArt II" OLE applet, and allowed fonts to be warped into various shapes. The later work, which involved writing a fast object-space hidden-surface removal algorithm, is used to produce 3D shaded text effects. These features are accessed by clicking the blue 3D "A" in the drawing toolbar. Our work was supervised by Rick Hawes and Tuan Nguyen.


A
The prototype Tim and I wrote let us do a number of fun effects. Here are some screen shots from the prototype:

Multiple objects Specular edges Text and reflection Antialiasing
1993 1994 1995 1995
When the feature shipped in 1997, Microsoft sent us a creative thank-you for our work.
Paul E. Debevec / paul@debevec.org