jango73 / quick3d

Qt based 3D engine with geo-referenced entities

Quick3D

Qt based 3D engine with geo-referenced entities

This used to be a very simple 3D engine that could show a 3D terrain and objects. But it has been pushed much further and is now a general purpose engine.

Building

Open .pro file in Qt Creator and build without shadow build option.

Features

• Global terrain with automatic level of detail. Can be generated from real earth elevation data or procedurally and can be populated with vegetation.
• Geo-referenced objects, with parent-child relationship
• Q3D file format, with a python script to export from Blender
• Scenes are setup in a XML file or at runtime
• Basic animation classes

Things to code or to fix

Optimize

• Frame rate drops too fast when scene goes up in complexity. Probably too much overhead on object/material setup.

Terrain

• Tile seams : for now, seams between terrain tiles are visible. Should create small patches on edges to match tiles.
• Z-fighting : should use an adaptive z-buffer depth to avoid this.
• Loading : sometimes tiles simply don't show up.
• Vegetation rendering : vegetation objects (and all alpha containing objects) should be rendered last to avoid alpha problems.
• Vegetation spawning : still some bug in this algorithm.

Animation

• Skinning : nothing done yet.

Camera

• Frustum : sometimes objects disappear because they are not considered inside the viewing frustum (although we know they are).

Materials

• PBR rendering : allow scripting of PBR methods for realistic shading.
• Shaders: there are some artefacts due to bad looping when using perlin noise.

quick3d's Issues

Physics : integrate the Bullet physics engine

Documentation : fully document every class in QDoc format

Terrain : Z Fighting

Prevent z fighting between terrain and water tiles at high altitudes

Rendering : handle normal maps

Physics : implement wheel and spring components

Dynamic textures : remove flickering

There is flickering in dynmically drawn textures, because of multi-threading.
Make better sync between main thread and texture updating threads.

Terrain : tile seams

Create patch objects between terrain tiles. Seams must not be visible.

Flight dynamics : better physics and handle stall

Camera : objects not drawn although in viewing frustum

Camera viewing frustum does not work properly in all cases. Objets may be excluded of rendering without proper reason.

Rendering : compute light occlusion

Occlusion percentage for lights must be computed for glow and ray effects.

Terrain : disappearing for a number of frames