Joined: Mar 18, 2026
Post Count: 2
Status:
Offline
New hobby project: sh3d viewer in QML/QtQuick3D
Hi all!
I've recently started a new little project, mainly to discover what I could do with QtQuick3D and its interesting rendering capabilities.
As I spent quite some time on SH3D rendering the new flat I moved in, it was a natural target to try and render a SH3D file.
The initial hope is that it might open new possibilities for realistic rendering, even though it's yet up to par.
So here it is: https://github.com/Tofee/sh3d-viewer-qml Building it requires Qt 6.11, mainly tested on Linux. It is licensed under GPL v3, feel free to play with the code if you want, however you want.
There are still plenty of bugs in there, but it begins to be interesting IMHO.
Here's a little screenshot, from one of SH3D examples:
Note that the transparency of materials is currently not being correctly imported by QtQuick3D. I fixed the bug in Qt 6.11, but it will only be included in their next release. It was also backported to Qt LTS 6.8.
There are limitations in QtQuick3D regarding the number of lights that can be included in the rendered scene (max 8 for my GPU), I'm not sure yet how to overcome this limitation. QtQuick3D is mainly designed for dynamic scenes, whereas I'll only be rendering static objects, so there might be a way to work around the limitation (shadow pre-rendering or something like that).
This project will evolve when I have some free time here and there, so it could be a bit slow. Also the goal is to learn, so, no vibe coding.
Netherlands
Joined: Apr 8, 2022
Post Count: 1791
Status:
Offline
Re: New hobby project: sh3d viewer in QML/QtQuick3D
Very interesting project! Rendering where the GPU is used is a long time wish from many users. The current render engines available in Sweet Home 3D only use the CPU, not the GPU.
One thing is not clear to me: it appears that QtQuick3D is only available with either a GPL3 or a commercial license. This would mean that only the users with the last 7.5 open source version of Sweet Home 3D could use it without having to buy a commercial license. The versions offered by Spacemushrooms through the app stores are not open sourced. Maybe I am reading it wrong and it only concerns the plugin but it is more difficult to program plugins using a closed source Sweet Home 3D instead of the source in debug mode.
That won't make a difference for the many Linux users, they are all using 7.5. Many of the plugin developers are on Linux too so maybe they will take a closer look at the code.
Thank you for sharing this!
---------------------------------------- Dodecagon.nl 1300+ 3D models, manuals, and projects
Joined: Mar 18, 2026
Post Count: 2
Status:
Offline
Re: New hobby project: sh3d viewer in QML/QtQuick3D
Thanks!
About the licensing, I think you got something wrong here: this is not a plugin, it's a standalone program! Therefore the GPL won't interfere with SH3D for any user.
It is *not* reusing any of SH3D code, I just took the specs of the SH3D file and built the app from there, comparing the visual outputs.
This is also why there are plenty of bugs to tackle :)
If someone wants to write a shortcut launcher plugin from the SH3D interface, well go ahead, personnally I have no idea how this is done...
