27.04.2023 
If you have bought an AAA game in recent years and wondered what it is doing when it says it is compiling shaders for a long time (up to an hour or more), then this blog will explain it a little.
Shader Variants Explosions of the Combinatorial Kind
Author Archives: Sean Harmer
Introducing KDBindings Reactive Programming and Data Binding in C++
All Qt developers should know about signals, slots, and properties. Those of you who have used QML will know that property bindings are super useful and cool. Bindings allow us to write more reactive and declarative style code. However, they are only available within QML, which means there are no compile time errors when you […]
Little Trouble in Big Data – Part 3 Dealing with resource bottlenecks
In the previous two blogs in this series I showed how solving an apparently simple problem about loading a lot of data into RAM using mmap() also turned out to require a solution that improved CPU use across cores. In this blog, I’ll show how we dealt with the bottleneck problems that ensued, and finally, […]
Little Trouble in Big Data – Part 2 improving CPU utilization across cores
In Part 1 of this series we solved the problem of using mmap() to load large set of data into RAM all at once. The catch was that it still took too long. In this blog, I describe how we solve this.
Little Trouble in Big Data – Part 1 how to use mmap() to load a large data set into RAM
We got a call from a bioinformatics group at a European university. The problem appeared simple, how to usemmap() to load a large data set into RAM all at once. OK, no problem I thought...
Writing a Custom Qt 3D Aspect – part 2 Setting up the backend and communications
Introduction In the previous article we gave an overview of the process for creating a custom aspect and showed how to create (most of) the front end functionality. In this article we shall continue building our custom aspect by implementing the corresponding backend types, registering the types and setting up communication from the frontend to […]
Writing a Custom Qt 3D Aspect – part 1 Extending Qt 3D via Aspects
Introduction Qt 3D has a flexible and extensible architecture that allows us to easily add our own new functionality to it without disrupting the existing features. The functionality of Qt 3D is divided among so-called aspects, each of which encapsulates a particular subject domain such as rendering, input, or animation. This short series of articles […]
Qt 3D Animation Easter Teaser Using Blender and Qt 3D in Qt 5.9 to create, texture, and animate a model
As an Easter treat here is a quick taster of some of the animation goodies coming to Qt 3D along with Qt 5.9. In this post we will briefly outline the steps needed to create a simple Qt 3D application and the assets it uses to produce this little animation:
Safety critical drawing with OpenGL SC The main sticking points when migrating OpenGL ES software to functionally safe OpenGL SC
Bringing software into a safety critical environment can be tricky, especially when using the complex APIs needed for modern 3D graphics. That’s what makes OpenGL SC (Safety Critical) so important: it bridges the gap between beautiful displays and functional safety, while trying to remain as close to existing embedded standards that we all know and love. OpenGL SC will only […]
Qt 3D and Physics Based Rendering QtCon presentation
Physics Based Rendering (PBR) is the latest and greatest trend in real-time rendering yielding much more visually believable images than the traditional Phong or ad-hoc lighting models. The underlying concept is that the shaders should use physical principles in the encoded models – chief of which are conservation of energy and the Fresnel effect. PBR […]