Experimentation, theory, and modeling have all played vital roles in defining what is known about microstructural evolution and the effects of microstructure on material properties. Recently, technology has become an enabling factor, allowing significant advances to be made on several fronts. Experimental evidence of crystallographic slip and the basic theory of crystal plasticity were established in the early 20th century, and the theory and models evolved incrementally over the next 60 years. During this time, modeling was primarily concerned with the average response of polycrystalline aggregates. While some detailed finite element modeling (FEM) with crystal plasticity constitutive relations was performed in the early 1980's such simulations over taxed the capacity of the available computer hardware. Advances in computer capabilities led to a flurry of activity in finite element modeling in the next 10 years, thus increasing understanding of lattice orientation evolution and generating detailed predictions of spatial orientation distributions that could not be readily validated with existing experimental characterization methods.