with the advent of amazing graphics GPU's on the market I believe the time has come for more realtime rendering tools available for analysis. A perfect oppertunity for this implimentation would be a live visualization tool that would move the hillshade light source around the view dynamically. Azimuth angle and altitude angle are changed via sliders and the results are generated instantly on screen. You may have the oppertunity to generate the new surface or series of surfaces permanantly to incorporate into your datasets for use in full resolution analysis or to animate as a canned portion of the map presentation.
