Building OCCT using MinGW

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).

Open CASCADE Technology 7.0 preview

Forums: 

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.

VTK integration services in OCCT

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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.

 

 

Redesigned selection in OCCT 6.9.0

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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.

Getting rid of plugin mechanism in OCAF persistence

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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.

Immediate mode in OCCT 3D Viewer

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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.

Dynamic highlighting in Local Context

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