Qt 6 is nearly upon us. While this has not been addressed by other publications, Qt 3D is also introducing a number of changes with this major release. This includes changes in the public API that will bring a number of new features and many internal changes to improve performance and leverage new, low-level […]

With Qt 6 well on its way, it's about time we go over some of the internal changes and optimizations made to Qt 3D for the upcoming release. In a separate article, my colleague Mike Krus has already highlighted the API changes we've made in Qt 3D for Qt 6. This post will dive into […]

Qt now provides a new module named Qt 3D. In this very short talk Giuseppe D'Angelo introduces some of the design ideas behind Qt 3D, discuss its use cases, and shows how simple it is to get 3D content in an application when using Qt 3D APIs. […]

Some of you may know that Qt 3D is going strong almost entirely due to the work of the KDAB team, led by Dr. Sean Harmer and Paul Lemire. You can read all about its near demise and ultimate rescue here - it’s quite a story, and started with the release of Qt 4. Now […]

Qt 3D makes heavy use of threads, as a way to spread work across CPU cores and maximize throughput, but also to minimize the chances of blocking the main thread. Though nice on paper, the last case eventually leads to added complexity. Sometimes, there are just one too many threads. In the past, we've been […]

At the heart of every 3D application is geometry. Qt 3D-based 3D applications are no different and require the user to either generate geometry or provide asset files for Qt 3D to load. This blog post demonstrates how Blender and its Python API could be used to write an exporter that generates geometry for Qt […]

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: The basic steps are: Create […]

As was previously discussed, since the 6.0.0 release of Qt, Qt 3D no longer ships as a pre-compiled module. If you need to use it on your projects, try out the new features, or just see your existing application is ready for the next chapter of Qt's life, you need to compile Qt 3D from […]

Qt 3D, being a retained mode high level graphic API abstraction, tries to hide most of the details involved in rendering the data provided by applications. It makes a lot of decisions and operations in the background in order to get pixels on the screen. But, because Qt 3D also has very rich API, developers […]

Up until now, Qt 3D was relying on OpenGL for rendering. With the upcoming Qt 6, Qt will come with a rendering abstraction layer (Rendering Hardware Interface or RHI) to target not only OpenGL but also Vulkan, Metal and DirectX. We are in the process of adding RHI support to Qt 3D. This will allow […]

Having 3D scenes in your application is becoming a clear trend and is likely to become even more important in the future with the growth of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. So far Qt was allowing you to integrate with Open GL fairly easily, but managing the rendering code itself was still a very challenging […]

As mentioned in the previous article in this series, Qt 3D 5.14 is bringing a number of changes aimed at improving performance. Most people familiar with Qt 3D will know that the API is designed around the construction of a scene graph, creating a hierarchy of Entities, each of them having having any number of […]

by Sean Harmer of KDAB 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 […]

KDAB is pleased to announce that the Qt 5.5.0 release includes a Technology Preview of the Qt3D module. Qt3D provides a high-level framework to allow developers to easily add 3D content to Qt applications using either QML or C++ APIs. The Qt3D module is released with the Technology Preview status. This means that Qt3D will […]