As my first subject for this animation blog series, we will be taking a look at Animation curves. Curves, or better, easing curves, is one of the first concepts we are exposed to when dealing with the subject of animation in the QML space. What are they? Well, in simplistic terms, they are a description […]

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 […]

Physics Based Rendering (PBR) is the latest and greatest trend in real-time rendering yielding much more visually believable images than the traditional Phong or ad-hoc lighting models. The underlying concept is that the shaders should use physical principles in the encoded models - chief of which are conservation of energy and the Fresnel effect. PBR […]

Design, Technical Excellence and Superb User Experience Why does a tipper truck need an app? Meiller is the leading manufacturer of tippers in Europe. KDAB software developers and UI/UX designers worked with Meiller to create a mobile app that interacts with embedded hardware on the truck, allowing drivers to diagnose and fix problems - even […]

Holoplot UX - Example of modern user interface that could benefit from compressed textures. (KDAB designed UX, photo courtesy of Holoplot.) It’s every programmer’s worst nightmare. Your beautiful app is running at a snail’s pace, crippled by virtual memory swapping. Even worse, you’ve added one last bitmap resource, and suddenly unrelated chunks of the UX […]

In the last episode of this blog series we learned about the overall concepts of input methods in Qt, with a look behind the scenes to see how a key press event from the native windowing system travels through the Qt input stack until it appears on screen inside a QLineEdit. In that context, the […]

What is an Input Method and what do we need it for? To answer that question, let's see what Wikipedia says: "An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that allows any data, such as keyboard strokes or mouse movements, to be received as input. In […]

JamesTurner and Giuseppe D’Angelo introducing Qt3D 2.0 Abstract: Qt3D 1.0 was created during the Qt4 life-cycle, and has been deprecated since the release of Qt5. Additionally, the API design featured some limitations which restricted the potential use-cases; injecting large amounts of dynamic data into the scene, configuring advanced multi-pass / deferred renderers, and using multiple […]

Abstract: Qt5 introduces better support for OpenGL from the QPA/Lighthouse abstraction, through a new set of OpenGL classes up to QtQuick 2 and Qt3D. OpenGL is also very often used for games and as the central content widget in desktop applications. With the advent of QtQuick 2 it is now easy to write entire user […]

Abstract: Modern OpenGL abandons the old fixed-function pipeline in exchange for a programmable pipeline using shaders and buffer objects. This offers much more flexibility to developers and opens the door to a huge range of effects and techniques whilst at the same time making available huge performance improvements. This presentation will teach you about the […]

Continuing our blog post series about the rewrite of Qt3D. Introduction For quite some time now, you’ve been hearing about Qt3D's Framegraph. Although a brief definition of what the Framegraph is was given in the previous articles, this blog post will cover it in more detail. After reading this post, you will understand the difference […]

So far we talked about the technical aspects of scaling your application, the dpi, the number of pixels, its nature, the nature of image formats and the implications of all that on the creation of visual elements for your UI. But this is only a part of the problem, for although all this helps you […]

Continuing our blog post series about the rewrite of Qt3D. One of the biggest driving factors behind the design of Qt3D 2.0 is the ability to configure the renderer in order to accommodate custom rendering techniques. In this blog post I will explain how to render a scene in Qt3D with shadows. The complete working […]

An Example of Rendering with Qt3D In the previous article we learned about the requirements and high-level architecture of Qt3D 2.0. In order to put some of this into context and to give you a concrete example of how it looks to draw something in Qt3D using the QML API, we will now briefly show […]

Introduction 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 that Qt3D should also […]

The Challenge Previously on this blog, we featured a series of articles about our QML-based presentation tool, SlideViewer. To quickly recap: SlideViewer is a presentation program that allows writing slides entirely in QML. There are situations in which the slide deck needs to be available in PDF format in addition to the QML source: For […]

Vectors. Moving away from my original plan, today we will be talking about Vectors. To start this series of posts I had a main motivator, SVG. It is a great file format, it's the file type I use day in day out and the format I use the most to create all of my images... […]

A couple of months ago, Jesper Pedersen introduced our presentation tool for trainings, called SlideViewer. As SlideViewer is mainly used for our Qt and Squish trainings, we naturally have many code examples on the slides, ranging from C++ and QML to Python and XML. In this blog post, we will take a closer look at […]

Several previous posts have introduced our SlideViewer tool which we created for use in the various trainings we deliver. The tool started out as an experiment, created using basic QtQuick 2 Items. Startup configuration was specified by command line arguments, and a simple Keys.onPressed function provided most of the runtime control: both navigating around the […]

In the previous blog post, we talked about the importance of pixels and their indivisible nature, the way we deal with that in the icon area and introduced the concept of PPI dependable UIs - all this to have truly scalable graphics in QML. We used the BorderImage element to illustrate how an element could […]