vizkit3d: a lightweight infrastructure to build data display using C++, OpenSceneGraph and Qt

vizkit3d is a lightweight infrastructure to allow the creation of 3D views to display data (and in particular data related to robotic sensing) live. It is used as the core 3D view implementation in Rock, the Robot Construction Kit. Nonetheless, vizkit3d uses only widely accepted libraries (Qt and OSG) and depends on the Rock framework in no way. It only uses Rocks cmake macros.

Vizkit3D functionality can also be accessed from Ruby by using the vizkit library.

Qt5 Porting Guide

Different to Qt4, Qt5 uses the meta object compiler to register plugins. This requires a few changes to the plugin objects(the classes derived from vizkit3d::VizkitPluginFactory) setup:

• The Qt4 macro must be protected against Qt5:

#if QT_VERSION < 0x050000
	Q_EXPORT_PLUGIN2(QtPluginVizkitBase, QtPluginVizkitBase)
#endif

• The class must use Q_OBJECT and have the line

#if QT_VERSION >= 0x050000
	Q_PLUGIN_METADATA(IID "rock.vizkit3d.VizkitPluginFactory")
#endif

• Since the class now needs to be processed by the moc, it is required that the class is declared in a header.

If the plugin is instantiated using the VizkitQtPlugin(name) macro, that needs to be replaced by two macro invocations; in a relevant header, use VizkitQtPluginHeaderDecls(name), and in a compilation object file(.cc/.cpp), add VizkitQtPluginImpl(name) (probably just replacing the VizkitQtPlugin(name) invocation).

It is possible to build both a Qt4 and Qt5 version of the plugins by avoiding placing the Qt4/Qt5 libraries and includes in the cmake directory scope variables. For this, it is easiest to use the Qt4/Qt5 targets provided by findPackage(Qt4 COMPONENTE QtCore ...)/findPackage(Qt5 COMPONENTS Core ...) in target_link_libraries(viz-qt4 PRIVATE Qt4::QtCore ...) and target_link_libraries(viz-qt5 PRIVATE Qt5::Core ...).