KDAB, Qt 3D and the Release of Qt 5.7

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 we are approaching another major chapter in the Qt 3D story, as Qt 5.7.0 is released along with a fully supported stable Qt 3D module. Qt 3D offers a high-level facility for 3D graphics, paving the way for making 3D content a first class citizen in Qt applications. This is big news!

Qt 3D allows you to quickly and easily build, render and interact with 3D scenes using either C++ or QML APIs. A custom Qt Quick 2 element called Scene3D is provided, allowing you to easily embed Qt 3D content into a Qt Quick 2 based UI. This allows you to compose 2D and 3D content to create visually stunning user interfaces for a wide range of domains including automotive IVI, medical, and other visualisations like this one.

Qt3D 2.0 has been designed and implemented based on KDAB engineers' experience of integrating custom 3D renderers into Qt. A lot of the work that has gone into it is not visible, in the form of prototypes, API reviews, testing, debugging, and profiling. This has resulted in over 2500 commits since we moved development into the public Qt git repositories.

Read Sean Harmer's blog, "Introducing Qt3D"...

You can see more about the Qt3D element of the release here.

Get the full story about this major new release of Qt 5.7 here and in the press release.

KDAB and The Qt Company will continue to improve Qt 3D to add new features, performance improvements, fix bugs and add more documentation and examples.