Taking 3D Content to the Next Level with Physics, Global Illumination, Reflections and Spatial Audio
Qt Quick 3D is a high-level Qt API for creating 3D scenes that can be seamlessly combined with 2D UI elements made with Qt Quick. It is also powers Qt Design Studio when it comes to working with 3D content and assets. Qt 6.4 brings a significant number of new features in the 3D space. These are highly relevant both for developers working with the QML APIs, and for designers who are using Qt Design Studio to create 3D scenes and user interfaces without any code. Qt 6.4 introduces the new Qt Quick 3D Physics module; a new high-level API for physics simulation with support for simulating static and dynamic rigid bodies, collision shapes, and a character controller. Also new is the technical preview of a global illumination solution based on pre-baked lightmaps. This allows us to create 3D scenes with more realistic lighting in ways that were not possible in earlier releases. Lightmap data is raytraced during the offline baking process, which allows for calculating indirect lighting simulating the bouncing of light from one surface to another, and allows for proper occlusion and shadows without the performance and accuracy limitations of real-time techniques. Reflection probes are the tools for creating highly realistic reflections in 3D scenes. They were introduced in Qt 6.3. Qt 6.4 brings higher quality, performance, and usability improvements. Qt Quick 3D's physically based materials have been undergoing constant improvements in the recent Qt releases. Qt 6.4 opens for using the specular/glossiness workflow instead of metallic/roughness, enabled by the new SpecularGlossyMaterial QML type. Custom materials and post-processing effects have been enhanced with support for cube map textures, which has also been incorporated into the scene environment allowing for new ways of specifying the skybox for a scene. Support for procedurally generated sky textures has been added as well. The Custom Material Editor tool, that first made its appearance in Qt 6.3, has been further hardened, allowing live editing and previewing of 3D materials with custom shader code. Finally, Qt Multimedia and Qt Quick 3D are introducing spatial audio support to enable placing sound sources in 3D space and simulating room acoustics with reflections and reverb. In this shared presentation, the developers of Qt Quick 3D are going to introduce some of the most important improvements in the engine and its APIs, while also demonstrating them both with code and real running example applications. #QtWS22 Learn more about Qt: https://qt.io
