SceneEnvironment QML Type

This property controls the antialiasing mode that is applied when rendering the scene.

Possible values are:

The default value is SceneEnvironment.NoAA.

Supersampling

The scene is rendered in a higher resolution, and then scaled down to actual resolution.

Pros: High quality. Antialiases all scene content and not just geometry silhouettes.

Cons: Usually more expensive than MSAA. Increases video memory usage. Supported with View3D items with all renderMode except Inline, but since the technique implies rendering to a texture first, enabling SSAA with a renderMode of Underlay or Overlay will result in using an intermediate texture and render pass that would normally not be needed, meaning the performance costs may be more noticeable. It is recommended to use SSAA only when the renderMode is the default Offscreen.

Multisampling

The edges of geometry are super-sampled, resulting in smoother silhouettes. This technique has no effect on the materials inside geometry, however.

Pros: Works with any View3D item regardless of the renderMode. Good results on geometry silhouettes, where aliasing is often most noticeable; works with fast animation without issues. Performance depends purely on the system's (GPU) capabilities.

Cons: Does not help with texture or reflection issues. Increases video memory usage. Can be expensive to use on less powerful graphics hardware. Can be controlled on a per-window basis or for individual View3D items depending on the renderMode. When using Underlay/Overlay with an effect applied or Offscreen, MSAA can be controlled for each View3D item. On the other hand, using Underlay/Overlay without any effect or Inline will make MSAA controlled per-window.

Progressive antialiasing

This property enables and sets the level of progressive antialiasing applied to the scene.

When all content of the scene has stopped moving, the camera is jiggled very slightly between frames, and the result of each new frame is blended with the previous frames. The more frames you accumulate, the better looking the result.

Pros: Provides great results when all content in the scene is standing still.

Cons: Does not take effect if any visual changes are occurring. Expensive due to having to accumulate and blend. Increases video memory usage.

See Anti-Aliasing Best Practices for further discussion on anti-aliasing methods.

This property sets the level of antialiasing applied to the scene. Behavior depends on used antialiasingMode. With antialiasingMode property set to NoAA this property doesn't have an effect.

Possible values are:

The default value is SceneEnvironment.High

This property defines a cutoff distance preventing objects from exhibiting ambient occlusion at close distances. Higher values increase the distance required between objects before ambient occlusion is seen.

The default value is 0.0.

This property defines roughly how far ambient occlusion shadows spread away from objects. Greater distances cause increasing impact to performance.

The default value is 5.0.

Pictured here with the default aoSoftness and the maximum aoStrength:

See also aoStrength and aoSoftness.

When this property is enabled it scatters the edges of the ambient occlusion shadow bands to improve smoothness (at the risk of sometimes producing obvious patterned artifacts).

The default value is false.

See also PerspectiveCamera.clipFar and OrthographicCamera.clipFar.

Enable or disable ambient occlusion.

The default value is false, which means ambient occlusion is disabled.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.5.

See also aoStrength and aoDistance.

This property defines ambient occlusion quality (more shades of gray) at the expense of performance.

The value must be 2, 3, or 4. The default value is 2.

This property defines how smooth the edges of the ambient occlusion shading are.

The value must be between 0.0 and 50.0. The default value is 50.0.

Pictured here with the default aoDistance and the maximum aoStrength:

See also aoStrength and aoDistance.

This property defines the amount of ambient occulusion applied. Ambient occulusion is a form of approximated global illumination which causes non-directional self-shadowing where objects are close together. A value of 100 causes full darkness shadows; lower values cause the shadowing to appear lighter. A value of 0 disables ambient occlusion entirely, improving performance at a cost to the visual realism of 3D objects rendered in the scene.

All values other than 0 have the same impact to the performance.

The default value is 0.0. The maximum value is 100.0.

A value of 0 is equivalent to setting aoEnabled to false.

Pictured here with the default aoSoftness and aoDistance:

See also aoEnabled, aoDistance, and aoSoftness.

This property controls if and how the background of the scene should be cleared.

The default value is SceneEnvironment.Transparent

Take the following example. The Suzanne model is expected to be pre-processed with the balsam tool and is sourced from the glTF Sample Models repository.

import QtQuick
import QtQuick3D
import QtQuick3D.Helpers

Item {
    width: 1280
    height: 720

    View3D {
        id: v3d
        anchors.fill: parent

        environment: ExtendedSceneEnvironment {
            backgroundMode: SceneEnvironment.SkyBox
            lightProbe: Texture { source: "00455_OpenfootageNET_field_low.hdr" }

            glowEnabled: true
            glowStrength: 1.25
            glowBloom: 0.25
            glowBlendMode: ExtendedSceneEnvironment.GlowBlendMode.Additive
        }

        DirectionalLight {
        }

        Suzanne {
            scale: Qt.vector3d(50, 50, 50)
            z: -500
        }

        PerspectiveCamera {
            id: camera
        }

        WasdController {
            controlledObject: camera
        }
    }
}

Using image-based lighting in additional to the DirectionalLight and also using the light probe texture as the skybox gives us the following:

What happens if there is no light probe?

backgroundMode: SceneEnvironment.Transparent

Here the background is provided not by the View3D but by the QQuickWindow or QQuickView hosting the 2D and 3D scene. Lighting is based on the DirectionalLight only.

Using a fixed clear color:

backgroundMode: SceneEnvironment.Color
clearColor: "green"

See also lightProbe, QQuickWindow::setColor(), Window::color, and View3D.

This property defines which color will be used to clear the viewport when using SceneEnvironment.Color for the backgroundMode property.

The default value is Qt::black

See also backgroundMode.

This property specifies a DebugSettings object which is used to configure the debugging tools of the renderer. During construction the SceneEnvironment automatically creates a DebugSettings object associated with itself, and therefore setting a custom DebugSettings is usually not required.

An example of rendering the scene with wireframe mode enabled:

Visualizing the normal vectors of the meshes:

Visualizing the specular lighting contribution:

This property was introduced in Qt 6.5.

See also DebugSettings.

When enabled, the renderer performs a Z-prepass for opaque objects, meaning it renders them with a simple shader and color write disabled in order to get the depth buffer pre-filled before issuing draw calls for the main rendering passes.

This can improve performance depending on the scene contents. It is typically scenes with lots of overlapping objects and expensive fragment shading that benefit from this. At the same time, it is worth noting that the renderer performs front to back sorting for opaque objects, which in itself helps reducing unnecessary fragment shading, and therefore the Z-prepass does not always bring significant improvements.

On GPUs that use a tiled rendering architecture, which is common in mobile and embedded systems, it is recommended to set this to false.

The default value is false.

The default value is true. By default the renderer classifies the objects in the scene either as opaque or as semi-transparent. The objects (sub-meshes with the associated material) in the opaque list are rendered first, with depth testing and depth write enabled, providing optimal Z-culling for typical 3D objects that have no semi-transparent regions. The objects in the semi-transparent list are rendered with depth write disabled, although still with depth testing enabled (to test against the opaque objects), in back to front order (sorted based on their center point's distance from the camera). This allows correct blending ("see through") for 3D objects that involve semi-transparent regions on their surface, either due to the node opacity or due to some color or texture map in the material.

When this property is set to false, the Z-buffer is not written and tested against, the depth test is skipped, and all objects, including fully opaque ones, are rendered in one go, sorted back to front.

Setting this property to false should be rarely needed. It can be useful in scenes where it is known that there is little benefit in the two-round approach because either there are very few opaque objects, or they are transformed in a way that a single back to front sorted pass performs better.

This property contains a list of post-processing effects that will be applied to the entire viewport. The result of each effect is fed to the next so the order is significant.

When this property is set to a valid Fog object, it is used to configure the renderer's built-in fog support.

The default value is null, which means no fog. This is equivalent to setting a Fog object with enabled set to false.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.5.

See also Fog.

This property defines an image used to light the scene, either instead of, or in addition to standard lights.

The image is preferably a high-dynamic range image or a pre-generated cubemap. Pre-baking provides significant performance improvements at run time, because no time is spent on filtering and mipmap generation. If the source is a .hdr or other image, the GPU-based pre-processing happens at run time after loading the image file, and that can be potentially time consuming, in particular on embedded and mobile hardware. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that applications pre-process .hdr images at latest at build time, as described here.

For more information on image-based lighting, see Using Image-Based Lighting.

The examples below were generated with varying the backgroundMode in the environment of the following scene. The scene has no DirectionLight, PointLight, or SpotLight. All lighting is based on the panoramic HDRI image.

import QtQuick
import QtQuick3D
import QtQuick3D.Helpers

Item {
    width: 1280
    height: 720

    View3D {
        id: v3d
        anchors.fill: parent

        environment: ExtendedSceneEnvironment {
            backgroundMode: SceneEnvironment.SkyBox
            lightProbe: Texture { source: "00455_OpenfootageNET_field_low.hdr" }

            tonemapMode: SceneEnvironment.TonemapModeFilmic
            sharpnessAmount: 0.4

            glowEnabled: true
            glowStrength: 1.25
            glowBloom: 0.25
            glowBlendMode: ExtendedSceneEnvironment.GlowBlendMode.Additive
        }

        Node {
            scale: Qt.vector3d(100, 100, 100)

            Sponza {
            }

            Suzanne {
                y: 1
                scale: Qt.vector3d(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
                eulerRotation.y: -90
            }
        }

        PerspectiveCamera {
            id: camera
            y: 100
        }

        WasdController {
            controlledObject: camera
        }
    }
}

Results with the above environment:

Switching the backgroundMode to SceneEnvironment.Transparent would give us:

Here the lighting of the 3D scene is the same as before, meaning the materials use the light probe in the lighting calculations the same way as before, but there is no skybox rendered. The background is white since that is the default clear color of the QQuickWindow hosting the 2D and 3D scene.

It is valid to set the lightProbe property value back to the default null. This unassigns the previously associated texture. For example, let's use the Delete key to dynamically toggle between image-based lighting with a skybox, and no image-based lighting with a fixed clear color for the background:

environment: ExtendedSceneEnvironment {
    id: env

    backgroundMode: SceneEnvironment.SkyBox
    lightProbe: iblTex

    tonemapMode: SceneEnvironment.TonemapModeFilmic
    sharpnessAmount: 0.4

    glowEnabled: true
    glowStrength: 1.25
    glowBloom: 0.25
    glowBlendMode: ExtendedSceneEnvironment.GlowBlendMode.Additive
}

Texture {
    id: iblTex
    source: "00455_OpenfootageNET_field_low.hdr"
}

focus: true
Keys.onDeletePressed: {
    if (env.backgroundMode == SceneEnvironment.SkyBox) {
        env.backgroundMode = SceneEnvironment.Color;
        env.clearColor = "green";
        env.lightProbe = null;
    } else {
        env.backgroundMode = SceneEnvironment.SkyBox;
        env.lightProbe = iblTex;
    }
}

Pressing Delete gives the following result. Remember that the scene used here has no lights so all 3D models appear completely black.

While lightProbe is commonly used in combination with Texture instances that source their data from an image file (typically .hdr or .ktx), it can also makes sense to associate with a Texture that uses in-memory, procedurally generated image data. A prime example of this is a Texture where the image data is generated by ProceduralSkyTextureData from the QtQuick3D.Helpers module:

backgroundMode: SceneEnvironment.SkyBox
lightProbe: Texture {
    textureData: ProceduralSkyTextureData {
    }
}

This gives us a procedurally generated HDR skybox texture that is now used both as the skybox and for image-based lighting:

See also backgroundMode, Using Image-Based Lighting, Pre-generating IBL cubemap, probeExposure, probeHorizon, probeOrientation, and ProceduralSkyTextureData.

When this property is set to a valid Lightmapper object, the settings specified by the object will be taken into account when baking lightmaps.

The default value is null, which means using default values for all the baking-related settings.

For more information on how to bake lightmaps, see the Lightmapper documentation.

When lightmaps are not relevant to an application and baked lighting is never generated, the property and the associated object serve no purpose in practice.

See also Model::usedInBakedLighting, Model::bakedLightmap, Light::bakeMode, and Lightmapper.

This property holds the Order Independent Transparency method. Setting this property to a valid OIT method causes the renderer to render transparent pixels in the correct depth order.

Possible values are:

The default is None and order independent transparency is turned off.

Weighted Blended

This is an approximation of order independent transparency. The transparent fragments are rendered to an offscreen buffer while weighting is applied to each fragment based on its distance to the camera. This buffer is then blended to the backbuffer after de-weighting each pixel. This method doesn't follow the source-over composition rule for all fragments and the result is different from the correct result, however this method works also on older hardware and is faster than the other more rigorous methods.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.9.

This property modifies the amount of light emitted by the light probe. Part of the tonemapping is exposure mapping, and this property adjusts how the light values in the light probes get tonemaped.

By default exposure is set to is 1.0

See also lightProbe, probeHorizon, and probeOrientation.

This property when defined with increasing values adds darkness (black) to the bottom half of the environment, forcing the lighting to come predominantly from the top of the image (and removing specific reflections from the lower half). This property is useful for accounting for a ground plane that would have the effect of obscuring the reflection of the light probe from the ground. This is necessary because light probe contributions come directily from the image without consideration for the content of the scene.

The expected value range for the probeHorizon property is between 0.0 and 1.0. Any value outside of this range will be clamped to the expected range.

By default probeHorizon is set to 0.0 which means the whole light probe is used without adjustment.

See also lightProbe, probeExposure, and probeOrientation.

This property when defines the orientation of the light probe. Orientation is defined in terms of euler angles in degrees over the x, y, and z axes.

See also lightProbe, probeHorizon, and probeExposure.

This property defines a scissor rectangle in view coordinates, with the top-left corner at [0, 0]

This property was introduced in Qt 6.5.

This property defines a cubemap to be used as a skybox when the background mode is SkyBoxCubeMap.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.4.

This property determines how much much the skybox should be blurred when using SceneEnvironment.SkyBox for the backgroundMode property. The default value is 0.0 which means there is no blurring.

Acceptable values range between 0.0 and 1.0, all other values will be clamped to this range.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.4.

When this property is enabled, specular aliasing will be mitigated. Specular aliasing is often visible in form of bright dots, possibly flickering when moving the camera around.

The default value is false.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.4.

When this property is enabled temporal antialiasing will be used.

The camera is jiggled very slightly between frames, and the result of each new frame is blended with the previous frame.

Pros: Due to the jiggling camera it finds real details that were otherwise lost; low impact on performance.

Cons: Fast-moving objects cause one-frame ghosting.

This property modifies the amount of temporal movement (antialiasing). This has an effect only when temporalAAEnabled property is true.

See also temporalAAEnabled.

This property defines how colors are tonemapped before rendering. All rendering in Qt Quick 3D is performed in linear color space and can in many cases lead to generating color values that are not displayable. The tonemapMode determines the technique that is used to remap colors into a displayable range.

The default value is SceneEnvironment.TonemapModeLinear

See ExtendedSceneEnvironment for an example of these different modes.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.0.