Weekly Report 3

GSoC Week 3 - Qt3D based backend for KStars

In the third week of GSoC, I worked on defining a coordinate system which works on right ascension and declination instead of x, y and z coordinates.

What’s done this week

• Shaders for Lambert, Azimuthal, Orthographic, Equirectangular, Stereographic and Gnomic projections.

• Shaders for instanced rendering with support for the above projection modes(Will be used for stars).

The Challenges

• Integration issues with the original SkyPainter API written to support multiple backends - Had to prototype outside of KStars.

• Lack of C++ resources for Qt3D.

• Switching SkyQPainter’s 2D projector class to GLSL.

What remains

My priorities for the next week include.

• Integrating written shaders and KStars backend.

• Display of grid lines and basic star catalog using SkymapComposite.

Demo

The Code

• Prototype for projections
• My fork for KStars