[Development] Repo request for Qt Quick 3D module

[Paul Wicking]

Repository has been created as requested.

- Paul

From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Andy Nichols <Andy.Nichols at qt.io>
Date: Wednesday, 14 August 2019 at 12:24
To: "development at qt-project.org" <development at qt-project.org>
Subject: [Development] Repo request for Qt Quick 3D module

Hello everyone,
 
As The Qt Company announced today on our blog, we have been working on creating a unified graphics story for our 2D and 3D Qt Quick API's and tooling. Part of this story is introducing a new module and API for defining 3D content in Qt Quick.
 
https://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/08/14/introducing-qt-quick-3d-high-level-3d-api-qt-quick/
 
repo name: qtquick3d
name: Qt Quick 3D
responsible person: me (Andy Nichols)
 
The code is currently hosted here: https://git.qt.io/annichol/qtquick3d
 
This code represents the effort to start the process of integrating 3D content into Qt Quick's rendering, bound by the limitations of binary compatibility in Qt Declarative.  The current code works against the Qt 5.12 LTS, and is a approximation of what we are trying to achieve as a whole.  For Qt 6 we are planning to further integrate with the existing Qt Quick Scenegraph infrastructure so that more APIs can be shared (for example QSGTexture, QSGGeometry), as well as making it easier to have QQuickItem based components rendered in spatial contexts.
 
There is a valid concern that this is yet another 3D solution for Qt, being that we currently are offering both Qt3D and Qt 3D Studio as supported solutions.  As stated in the blog post, this isn't a replacement of Qt3D, as Qt3D is a low level API for creating 3D runtimes.  With regard to Qt 3D Studio, this project is an evolution of that offering.  Qt 3D Studio has the issue that the runtime it ships with overlaps very much so with Qt Quicks offering, while still leaving a lot of gaps in functionality that Qt Quick already provides. Rather than continuing to try and fill those gaps and fragment our HMI story further, we would rather extend Qt Quick to support a high level 3D API that Qt 3D Studio tries to provide. So with Qt Quick 3D we functionally have a QML API for using the features of Qt 3D Studio, while simultaneously enabling us to unify our tooling story for Qt Design Studio. 
 
Our goal is to reduce the amount of things we are working on in parallel, and focus our efforts on extending the functionality of Qt Quick. This goes hand-in-hand with the modernization of Qt Quick with the QtRHI work.
 
We would like to provide a tech-preview of this module along with 5.14.0 and continue to develop the project further out in the open.  
 
Regards,
Andy Nichols