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Besides being widely applied in open-source and commercial projects, Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) is actively used at an academic and research levels around the globe. To provide insight into it Open Cascade launches a new section devoted to OCCT-based research on a renovated Development Portal. It gathers hundreds of research and scientific articles from prominent universities and organizations in more than 40 countries.

Being the only open-source full-scale 3D geometry library Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) is commonly used in academic and research spheres by high-profile organizations all around the world including prominent universities, scientific institutions, and even R&D departments of commercial companies.

Open Cascade continues publishing Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) maintenance releases. The next OCCT maintenance release (version 7.5.3) is prepared.

The sources of Open CASCADE Technology 7.5.3 are available under the V7_5_3 tag in the OCCT repository.

This maintenance release fixes the following critical problems:

Since its publication as an open-source 3D modeling kernel, Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) has become a backbone for numerous outstanding projects.  We are excited to announce that the marketplace for OCCT-based projects is launched on OCCT Development Portal!

Having received numerous requests from the open-source community Open Cascade decided to publish free trainings to ease access to Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT). Free presentations available on the recently renewed Development Portal cover Preliminaries, Geometry, and Topology topics.

Preliminaries subject aims at general OCCT-related problems. It focuses on general tasks like getting OCCT, its structure, building from sources, etc. In addition to Open CASCADE Technology overview, the training provides several performance tips and describes Draw Application functionality.

Open Cascade continues publishing Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) maintenance releases. The next OCCT maintenance release (version 7.5.2) is prepared. 

The sources of Open CASCADE Technology 7.5.2 are available under the V7_5_2 tag in the OCCT repository.

This maintenance release fixes the following critical problems:

Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) testing dataset is published on the renovated developer portal.

OCCT 7.5.0 has introduced PBR (physically-based rendering) metal-roughness material workflow in it’s real-time rendering engine. This feature brings more realistic rendering of metal materials and, which might be even more important, an industry-adopted material definition supported by many 3D applications (thanks to glTF 2.0 aka “JPEG for 3D” wide adoption).

PBR is considerably much more computationally intensive compared to old simplified approximations like Phong/Gouraud shading models, and involves a lot of optimization tricks to bring PBR to real-time. At the moment of development of PBR in OCCT, OpenGL 3.0 (released in ‘2008) with it’s mobile counterpart OpenGL ES 3.0 (specs released ‘2012) was considered a good baseline covering the majority of modern devices for PBR implementation. But what about WebGL?

Apple has just released its first generation of ARM-based desktop computers. Macs used exclusively Intel CPUs since transition from IBM PowerPC in 2006, but now Apple believes that their own SoC, originally developed for mobile devices (iPhone and iPad), can replace Intel CPUs within the whole line of products in just 2 years!

Apple M1 SoC became the heart of several low-end devices within the ‘2020 line of products, but Apple promises an outstanding performance difference compared to previous Intel-based generation of products. This is difficult to believe! Could this be true?

OCCT 7.5.0 introduces a redesigned progress indication API with the Message_ProgressIndicator class as an entry point. The redesign was focused on the following objectives:

• Allow propagating a progress indicator to nested algorithms within multiple working threads.
• Handle various inconsistencies and bugs in existing design (e.g. causing incorrect progress indication due to internal bugs).
• Improve logic to detect and reveal API misuse (e.g. causing incorrect progress indication due to incorrect API usage).
• Make the public API more straight-forward and clear for using in algorithms.

Forthcoming OCCT 7.5.0 release extends its real-time rendering engine with a PBR (physically-based rendering) mode. OCCT implements PBR metal-roughness material workflow described by core glTF 2.0 specifications and also includes glTF data exchange components. New functionality opens a door to a new level of realism and visual quality of displayed models, and improves interoperability across various 3D engines supporting the same material workflow.