Irrlicht in Qt/QML

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csell
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri May 26, 2017 6:44 pm

Irrlicht in Qt/QML

Post by csell »

Hello all,

I am looking for a 3D engine which I can integrate into my Qt/QML (aka QtQuick) application. I have done this with other engines before (GLC, VTK) and am hoping for improvement in overall usability and conceptual power (and portability to mobile devices!) through Irrlicht. But before I can get at Irrlicht programming proper, there is some work to do in bringing QML and Irr together. This is a little special, because QML is itself OpenGL-based and behaves very differently from "traditional" windowing engines.

Integration of external OpenGL rendering engines into QML goes by way of a FBO which is accessed from both sides. For that purpose, my QML item ("item" is the displayable unit in QML) has to create a QOpenGLFrameBufferObject which wraps the OpenGL FBO, and pass that along to the external rendering engine. To be precise, if I understand this correctly, the FBO would be bound into the current context by Qt, and the external engine would just render into it. Qt will then blit the FBO with the display buffer.

My question is, how (or whether) this fits with the Irrlicht architecture. I know from experience that this can get a little tricky, and I wasn't able to make out the secret path to circumvent Irrlichts default OpenGL resource management. Any help would be appreciated.

regards + thanks,
Christian Sell
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