Kuesa's workflow

There are traditionally two main workflows to integrate real-time 3D content into an application:

• Hand-made workflow: the designers create mockups of the scenes and the developers recreate them in code, leading to lots of communication overhead, misunderstandings and suboptimal results.
• External tool workflow: the designers and developers work on a common tool for editing the scene for integrating into the application limiting both to the constraints of the tool and creating a black box which provides little control.

Kuesa provides an easy, integrated and unified workflow without any compromises for designers and developers with:

• Great performances, from desktops to embedded boards
• Great quality of the real-time 3D scenes
• Full expressiveness for the designers, using professional 3D design tools
• Full control of the integration by the developers
• A reduced time to market

The workflow is based on the glTF™ (GL Transmission Format) format designed by the Khronos Group, a royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by applications supporting vendor extension.

Kuesa's strengths

• Uses professional 3D design tools for scene creation: 3ds Max®, Blender…
• Provides tools for previewing, optimizing, checking and optimizing assets
• Provides a seamless integration in Qt and Qt3D applications
• Gives full control of the scene from the code, for complex interaction

Kuesa components

Kuesa Studio

Kuesa Studio is only available as a commercial package. It is the designer facing part of the Kuesa workflow.

Kuesa Digital Content Creation Plugins

• Blender 2.82 or later
  • Blender 2.8 comes with an official glTF 2.0 export
  • Kuesa add-on for Iro Materials support and dedicated glTF extensions for animations, layers, reflections...
• Blender 2.79 (deprecated)
  • Kuesa Blender 2.79 glTF2 Exporter plugin
• Other 3D Design softwares
  • Kuesa 3ds Max glTF2 Exporter plugin

Kuesa Studio Tools

The Kuesa-Studio comes with a gltf tool to preview and introspect scenes.

It also provides tools to condition assets to integrate as part of the build process.

Kuesa Runtime

It is the developer facing part of the Kuesa workflow. It is materialized as a library on top of Qt 3D that provides:

• glTF2 compliant importer that generates a Qt 3D based scene
• Custom PBR materials
• Iro Materials
• Asset collections to retrieve assets by name
• Post Processing Effects
• Reflection Planes
• Placeholders

Tools

The Kuesa-Runtime comes with the gltfViewer tool to preview scenes.

Checkout out our video tutorial on creating an interactive 3D application with Kuesa.

Kuesa Runtime Features

glTF 2 Importer

The class GLTF2Importer is a Qt3DCore::QNode based class that allows loading glTF 2 files. glTF 2 files from any exporter should work, note however that the Kuesa specific exporter allow the use of additional features, namely:

• Qt 3D compatible PBR Material support
• glTF 2.0 Extensions
  • KHR_materials_unlit
  • KHR_lights_punctual
  • KHR_texture_transform
  • EXT_property_animation
  • KHR_draco_mesh_compression
  • KDAB_custom_material for Iro Materials export
  • KDAB_kuesa_layers for Qt 3D layer export
  • KDAB_kuesa_reflection_planes for Reflection Planes export
  • KDAB_kuesa_placeholder for Placeholder export

Asset Collections

Once a file has been loaded through the use of the glTF 2 importer, name based collections are populated. Kuesa provides the following collections for:

• Entities
• Transforms
• Animation Clips
• Animation Mappings
• Cameras
• Effects
• Materials
• Meshes
• Skeletons
• Textures
• Images
• Reflection Planes

Kuesa Optimized Frame Graph

Kuesa provides the ForwardRenderer Frame Graph which is optimized for the rendering of glTF2 scenes with the addition of post processing effects.

Full Screen Post Processing Effects

Final screen composition can be customized through the use of post processing effects. The effects work along with the default provided Kuesa FrameGraph ForwardRenderer.

Currently Kuesa provides the following effects:

• Bloom
• Gaussian Blur
• Opacity Masking
• Thresholding
• Depth Of Field

More information about post-processing effects is provided here: Kuesa post-processing effects.