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In the past, graphic card in computer was designed to perform limited set of operations. At some point, all cards had to provide the hardware-accelerated functionality called Transformation and Lighting (T&L). Application developers had to implement all features and visual effects that were not parts of the fixed set of graphic card functionality on CPU.

Open CASCADE Technology 7.0.0.rc can be built using MinGW-w64 on Windows platform.

MinGW is a minimalistic development environment for developing native Windows applications based on GCC. Project MinGW-w64 is its fork aimed to support 64-bit target and new APIs.

GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) remains a main compiler on Linux platform, but is a second-class citizen on platforms like Windows (with dominating msvc - a C/C++ compiler from Microsoft Visual Studio) or OS X (where Apple has pushed developers towards clang).

Hello,

We are pleased to announce that beta testing campaign of OCCT 7.0 has finished, and OCCT 7.0.0 Release Candidate is available.
This time beta testing was especially fruitful: we have got several dozens inputs from the community, which helped to improve OCCT for this release.

Stereoscopic rendering has been first introduced in Open CASCADE Technology 6.8.0. Initial support has been limited to shutter glasses and off-screen rendering. OCCT 6.9.1 improves this functionality and extends the list of supported consumer display devices.

Dear All,

We have finalized development of several major new features for Open CASCADE Technology 7.0.
The most essential changes -- removal of CDL and WOK -- have been raised to master branch of the OCCT Git repository last Friday, and we propose this version for public review, as "alpha" version of OCCT 7.0.

This article is aimed to give overview of the major changes already integrated, and give idea of the effort required to port existing code on the new version.

OCCT provides built-in Interactive Services based on own OpenGL-based Visualization component. The basic functionality consists of but not limited to presentation and selection of topological shapes (TopoDS_Shape), which are the key objects in OCCT, but also various presentations for arbitrary mesh data, text annotations and others. Nowadays it works on wide range of platforms, including mobile ones, supports custom GLSL programs, GPU-accelerated Ray Tracing, and plenty of other modern features.

However one might decide to use alternative Visualization component, for historical reasons or for project-specific features. One of the most popular and powerful among freely available visualization toolkits is VTK.

One of the most breaking changes in visualization component in OCCT 6.9.0 is complete reconsideration of selection mechanism. The new algorithm is designed to improve performance of dynamic selection of complex scenes by using effective 3D acceleration structures which are built only once and are autonomous from the camera.

Hello All,

The release of OCCT 6.9.0 is published.

The corresponding tag in Git is "V6_9_0".

Hi All,

At the moment OCCT OCAF persistence uses plugin mechanism, when library providing persistent functionality for particular subset of OCAF attributes is loaded dynamically at runtime by OCAF.
For that, the plugin library name and location must be properly defined with help of predefined set of environment variables and resource files.
This system is quite complex and not transparent, especially for beginners.

OCCT 3D viewer provides the way for rendering temporary presentations without redrawing previously drawn content.
This feature is designed to optimize viewer performance when only small part of the scene is changed dynamically, usually providing some feedback for user actions.

This article describes this functionality and its evolution in recent versions of OCCT.

In some cases when a rendered closed shell consists of faces with different colors, visual artifacts at the edge of faces appearing at a certain view angle (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The visual artifacts on a simple cube

The back-face culling mechanism allows removing these artifacts.