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Weekly Report 1
GSoC Week 1 - Qt3D based backend for KStars
The coding period for GSoC officially started on 1st of June. My project aims at adding a 3D based backend to KStars which currently utilizes QPainter to render the realtime night sky in 2D.
What’s done this week
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Extension of the original KStars Skymap to show a Qt3D scene.
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A horizon which displays a clear sky where skyobjects are supposed to be rendered.
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Addition of textures and few skyobjects(Sun and Moon).
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Connection of the scene with KStars backend to get the positions of respective skyobjects.
The Challenges
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Integration issues with the original SkyPainter API written to support multiple backends.
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Qt3D’s scenegraph based rendering on KStars which displays and updates data frame-by-frame.
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Environment Light support to color the horizon based on Sun/Moon position.
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Position Synchronization base on the projection mode used.
What remains
My priorities for the next week include.
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Instance rendering for millions of stars displayed by KStars.
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Dig deep into projection modes and shader coding based on the pre-existing Projector class in KStars.
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Transformation updates based on signals instead of frame by frame.
Demo
