Building Qt3D

Building Qt3D Using QtCreator / QtSDK

Here is a step-by-step guide to building Qt3D using the QtCreator IDE. QtCreator is the development environment for the QtSDK. As you can see in the screenshot below, we're using the beta version 2.5 on Linux, but other operating systems and versions should look similar. Always use the latest release of QtCreator if possible.

Step 1 - Open the Qt3D project.

Choose Open from the File menu and navigate to the qt3d.pro project file $HOME/depot/qt/qt3d/qt3d.pro. Click Open.

Step 2 - Select the Qt and load Qt3D.

Set the Qt5 build that you created above. In the screenshot below there is a situation where we have a number of Qt versions to choose from, so it is easiest to uncheck all of the ones we don't need, then check the one we want - which is the Qt5 version created above. You may need to add it using the "Manage" button first.

After a short time QtCreator will have loaded up the Qt3D project, read all its project files and display the source tree as shown below.

Step 3 - Set up for Building.

Click the projects tab at the left to display the Qt3D target's Build Settings pane, marked in the screenshot below.

Here you can specify a Shadow Build directory. It is always a good idea to build in a shadow directory, instead of inside the source tree.

In the screenshot below we use file management windows invoked by the the browse button to create the shadow build directory as a "new folder", which we'll call "qt3d" to match the project name.

Here's another handy trick - set QtCreator to use multiple cores when it builds, if its supported on your platform. On Mac and other platforms that use GCC I can set the -j 4 argument to make.

Do this by expanding the details of the make step in the projects page, then enter the extra arguments, as shown below.

For Windows check for the jom tool which you will already be using automatically, to see how many parallel jobs your build will use.

Special note for Windows - make sure that the type of build matches the Qt that you are building against. In the case of binary packages, and the Qt that ships with the SDK these are binary release builds - so in those cases set your Qt3D to a release build also. One way to tell that this has gone wrong is that your Qt3D library will be called Qt3Dd.dll (note the lower case "d" for debug) when your QtGui library is called QtGui4.dll (no lower case "d").

Step 4 - Build Qt3D and run a test App.

By default the Qt build system used by QtCreator will build Qt3D in debug mode.

Now hit the build button (marked with a red arrow in the screenshot below)

Qt3D will go ahead and compile all its libraries, plugins and QML imports.

The build is set up so that these will be placed into the directories as specified by the host qmake - inside the Qt build tree. To find what these directories are run qmake -query. If you like after the build you can check those directories to be sure that Qt3D's files got placed there correctly.

As explained above for this reason you will need to have the privileges on your computer to write to the directories given by qmake -query. On Windows this is generally not a problem. On Mac and Linux it should work fine when building with the SDK which is by default installed in your home directory. It will also be fine with builds from a source package.

Qt3D will also place its qt3d.prf and qt3dquick.prf files into the host Qt's QMAKE_MKSPECS/features directory. Again see qmake -query for what that directory is on your system. This means that you can write Qt3D applications in C++ that use the libraries by simply adding CONFIG += qt3d to your .pro file.

If you get early errors about not being able to copy the .prf files then check that you have set up QtCreator to use a Qt that you can write to.

The build will then continue on and compile all of Qt3D's examples and demos, using the libraries as installed. When finished a message like "The process /usr/bin/make exited normally" should be displayed.

There is no need to run a make install step.

Now you can use QtCreator to run one of the examples. You can do this by right clicking on the example you want to run in the build tree (in this case, the "basket" app), then clicking the green arrow bottom to actually launch the app.

Congratulations on building Qt3D!

 $ cd $HOME/build/qt5
 $ make module-qt3d
 $ make -j 4
 $ bin/basket

 cd \build\qt5
 nmake module-qt3d
 bin\basket

 $ cd $HOME/build/qt5/qt3d
 $ bin/teapot