[Interest] QtQuick over Qt3D (Qt 5.15)

Thu Apr 1 00:09:27 CEST 2021

 Unlike what was stated above, AFAIK the development of QtQuick3D has nothing to do with Qt3D licensing and kde agreements and what so ever.The following blog shows a good picture of QtQuick3D and why it was created, purely based on technicall reasons.
Introducing Qt Quick 3D: A high-level 3D API for Qt Quick

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Introducing Qt Quick 3D: A high-level 3D API for Qt Quick

Introducing Qt Quick 3D: A high-level 3D API for Qt Quick. Qt Quick 3D, provides a high-level API for creating 3...
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Cheers
João

    Em quarta-feira, 31 de março de 2021 16:34:12 GMT+1, eric.fedosejevs at gmail.com <eric.fedosejevs at gmail.com> escreveu:  

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Hi Konstantin,

Welcome to the hell that is 3D in Qt.

To understand the problems that you are facing, you need to know a little history. Other users can perhaps provide additional insight or correct any errors, since my recollection and understanding of these matters is probably not perfect.

Qt3D was introduced in 2016 to much fanfare and was going to be the primary 3D solution for Qt. The idea was that Qt3D would provide a high-performance core capable of modern 3D graphics. Then, in 2017, Qt Co. had a philosophical shift and realized that rather than offering 3D functionality through LGPL/C++ (which could also be used by those darned open-source users), they could make more money in the short-term by locking in John Deere/others into subscription-based commercial licensing to display their little tractor animations. Because of the KDE agreement, they could not simply modify the license on Qt3D going forward, so they had to start from scratch with a new GPL/QML package: enter QtQuick3D.

The result was that Qt3D was mostly abandoned in a half-finished and unpolished state and development efforts shifted to QtQuick3D. In doing so, Qt Co. shot themselves in the foot in the long-term, of course, since, as you have probably noticed, in the absence of a public C++ interface, QtQuick3D is not particularly useful for "complex use cases". As a result, "complex users" have either stuck with native OpenGL or have bashed their heads on the wall trying to adopt Qt3D, and the dream of modern 3D graphics in Qt applications has died.

Because some customers had already switched to Qt3D, and moreover because Qt Co. needs to maintain the illusion that Qt3D is not dead (KDE agreement concerns), every few years, Qt Co. will claim that Qt3D is still alive and will be improved (just like widgets!). But the proof is in the pudding: Qt3D is no longer included in the Qt6 binary distribution, only in source form. This just so happens to be the absolute bare minimum that Qt Co. must do to avoid giving KDE the right to release all of Qt under a BSD license.

This brings us to your use case. As you have noticed, the Qt3D examples are outdated and many are broken. This is by design to discourage use. In Qt6, you can’t even use Qt3D unless you build it from source (not sure about the state of the Qt3D examples, I’m sticking with Qt5). QtQuick3D (like QtQuick as a whole) has no public C++ interface, even though exposing the internal classes would be trivial. This is also by design to lock commercial users into QML.

So what to do? The answer depends on whether your 3D needs fall into the category of "complex use", e.g. more than little tractor animations. If not, and if you're okay with GPL/commercial licensing, you're honestly probably better off switching to QtQuick3D.

Otherwise, you have a few options. If you’re completely committed to Qt3D, but not completely committed to QtQuick for your overlay, you may want to use Dear ImGUI on top of Qt3D (Lazlo has a mostly working example on top of Qt3D: https://github.com/alpqr/imgui-qt3d). You can also use Dear ImGUI directly on top of RHI for Qt5.12+ (https://github.com/alpqr/qrhiimgui). I haven’t dug into the code, but you may be able to repurpose these samples to instead blit/render QtQuick over top of Qt3D/RHI, without the need to create a billboard.

I would seriously ask yourself whether you want to be developing a new application with Qt3D, however. If you’re doing anything more than displaying a model or two, there are various open source 3D graphics engines/frameworks under active development with better performance and features that you can embed into a Qt widget (I’d suggest Magnum, Ogre, and BGFX, depending on desired level of abstraction – all have working ImGUI overlay examples).

Cheers,

Eric

From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Konstantin Shegunov
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2021 5:29 AM
To: Interests Qt <Interest at qt-project.org>
Subject: [Interest] QtQuick over Qt3D (Qt 5.15)

Hello,
I want to overlay a QtQuick UI over a Qt3D scene I'm having, however (here comes the "but") I want to do it from C++. I don't want to get into instantiating Scene3D at all, I want to drive the Quick scene from Qt3D, not vice versa (i.e. I don't want to render the 3D content to an FBO, and I don't intend to depend on the QML engine to setup the Qt3D parts). Sound(ed) like a simple-enough task at first, but I'm having the worst time figuring it out.

To start, I've set the Qt3D things up and I can show my mesh. For the second part, I read a lot of the sources around Scene3D, Scene2D and Qt3D examples but it doesn't appear this "obvious" thing to do is covered anywhere, notwithstanding half the Qt3D examples being broken (either segfaulting or not building at all).

I was initially intending to get some ideas from Scene3D, but it appears it works directly with the private classes for one, and for two it forces synchronous rendering that's driven from the quick scene ... and as a typical QtQuick item it doesn't expose a public C++ class ... 
If I missed something there, please feel welcome to correct me.

So after the next batch of sifting through Qt3D's own internals, the renderer plugin and such, I am relatively convinced the only reasonable way to do this is to render the UI offscreen to a texture and to just slap that texture on the screen on each Qt3D frame. Is this correct? If that's so, let's say I can render the quick scene to a texture, how do I go about putting it on the screen after the framegraph's been executed? I couldn't see a framegraph node that'd do that for me. Am I to write my own? Is it the case that I need to create a "fake" quad (i.e. a billboard) that I must reorient together with the camera? I saw in one of Florian Blume's repositories that he uses a second camera and another branch in the framegraph to put a background image in. Is this the way to do it, or is there some better way?

Additional question(s):
Do I spin my thread (which I sync manually) for rendering the quick scene?

Thanks for any and all pointers.

Kind regards,
Konstantin.
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