Using Google filament with GtkGlArea

[dov (Dov Grobgeld)]

Hello,

Google in 2018 released a very sophisticated 3D rendering library, Filament.

I wonder if anyone has tried integrating it with gtk? The problem is that Filament runs its own thread and it is not very easy share its GL context.

Still people have succeeding in integrating it with both GLFW and with Qt. I wonder if anyone has tried integrating it into Gtk3 or Gtk4?

I’d like to integrate it with my text to mesh generator GitHub - dov/pomelo: An interactive application for creating 3D meshes of text to create more fancy eye candy.

Here are some links:

• GitHub - google/filament: Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2 - Filament repo
• GitHub - nitronoid/qt_filament: Simple hello world example of using filament within a Qt window - Example of using filament with Qt
• GitHub - roxlu/filament-with-glfw: Example that shows how to use Filament with GLFW and my feature-get-texture-id branch to use Filament with a shared OpenGL context

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

In theory it’s entirely possible to achieve this: GStreamer uses GL from different threads using shared contexts, and then draws on the GL context provided by GtkGLArea.

You may want to look at GThree as well, if you’re looking at a 3D rendering library that integrates with GTK3 and GTK4.

[dov (Dov Grobgeld)]

Thanks a lot for the tip. I wasn’t aware of GThree, and looks very useful, and it seems fully capable of doing the kind of fancy rendering I’m looking for. I just have to figure out how to create materials for it. But I probably want to be able to create gltf files in any case for exporting, and these can already be displayed by GThree.