JamesTurner and Giuseppe D’Angelo introducing Qt3D 2.0 Abstract: Qt3D 1.0 was created during the Qt4 life-cycle, and has been deprecated since the release of Qt5. Additionally, the API design featured some limitations which restricted the potential use-cases; injecting large amounts of dynamic data into the scene, configuring advanced multi-pass / deferred renderers, and using multiple […]

Abstract: Qt5 introduces better support for OpenGL from the QPA/Lighthouse abstraction, through a new set of OpenGL classes up to QtQuick 2 and Qt3D. OpenGL is also very often used for games and as the central content widget in desktop applications. With the advent of QtQuick 2 it is now easy to write entire user […]

Abstract: Modern OpenGL abandons the old fixed-function pipeline in exchange for a programmable pipeline using shaders and buffer objects. This offers much more flexibility to developers and opens the door to a huge range of effects and techniques whilst at the same time making available huge performance improvements. This presentation will teach you about the […]

Continuing our blog post series about the rewrite of Qt3D. Introduction For quite some time now, you’ve been hearing about Qt3D's Framegraph. Although a brief definition of what the Framegraph is was given in the previous articles, this blog post will cover it in more detail. After reading this post, you will understand the difference […]

So far we talked about the technical aspects of scaling your application, the dpi, the number of pixels, its nature, the nature of image formats and the implications of all that on the creation of visual elements for your UI. But this is only a part of the problem, for although all this helps you […]

Continuing our blog post series about the rewrite of Qt3D. One of the biggest driving factors behind the design of Qt3D 2.0 is the ability to configure the renderer in order to accommodate custom rendering techniques. In this blog post I will explain how to render a scene in Qt3D with shadows. The complete working […]

An Example of Rendering with Qt3D In the previous article we learned about the requirements and high-level architecture of Qt3D 2.0. In order to put some of this into context and to give you a concrete example of how it looks to draw something in Qt3D using the QML API, we will now briefly show […]

Introduction Back in the days when Qt was owned by Nokia, a development team in Brisbane had the idea of making it easy to incorporate 3D content into Qt applications. This happened around the time of the introduction of the QML language and technology stack, and so it was only natural that Qt3D should also […]

The Challenge Previously on this blog, we featured a series of articles about our QML-based presentation tool, SlideViewer. To quickly recap: SlideViewer is a presentation program that allows writing slides entirely in QML. There are situations in which the slide deck needs to be available in PDF format in addition to the QML source: For […]

Moving away from my original plan, today we will be talking about Vectors. To start this series of posts I had a main motivator, SVG. It is a great file format, it's the file type I use day in day out and the format I use the most to create all of my images... […]

A couple of months ago, Jesper Pedersen introduced our presentation tool for trainings, called SlideViewer. As SlideViewer is mainly used for our Qt and Squish trainings, we naturally have many code examples on the slides, ranging from C++ and QML to Python and XML. In this blog post, we will take a closer look at […]

Several previous posts have introduced our SlideViewer tool which we created for use in the various trainings we deliver. The tool started out as an experiment, created using basic QtQuick 2 Items. Startup configuration was specified by command line arguments, and a simple Keys.onPressed function provided most of the runtime control: both navigating around the […]

In the previous blog post, we talked about the importance of pixels and their indivisible nature, the way we deal with that in the icon area and introduced the concept of PPI dependable UIs - all this to have truly scalable graphics in QML. We used the BorderImage element to illustrate how an element could […]

Following on from the previous articles on SlideViewer, we shall now investigate another piece of the puzzle towards making SlideViewer usable in practise. Namely, getting the content rendered from our domain specific language and on to the screen or projector for the audience to marvel at. Those of you that have ever presented at […]

In the earlier post, we talked about the difficulty of scaling Uis across the current PPI range we have on the mobile and embedded space. We also hinted that the most common way to avoid this problem was done via providing several image assets that help to mitigate this issues. How does it work? How […]

A User Experience is not defined to exist in a single form factor any more. It is expected to be able to flow from one device to another, seemingly adapting itself to each interaction paradigm, and yet retain branding, mood and overall look and feel across multiple platforms. On the other hand, it's expected that […]

Introduction At Qt developer Days in Berlin 2013 I had an Aha! moment. I saw a presentation written in QML rather than the usual Powerpoint/LibreOffice/Keynote. It wasn't that I did not imagine this was possible, rather the contrary, after all in KDAB we have more than 3000 slides on Qt-related topics, all written in .... […]

Could you say something about yourself? Well, my name Nuno Pinheiro, I'm 34 years old, I'm a designer living in Portugal, I have a degree in Civil Engineering. Throughout my life I have always wanted to understand what made things work, (much at the expense of my parent's patience, and countless broken apart gadgets that […]