Stefan Habel

aQtree

A stand-alone non-photorealistic renderer

My role: Software Engineer, UI Designer
Languages/Frameworks used: C++, Qt, OpenGL

aQtree, originally named aquaTree, was a cooperation between University of Konstanz, brainpets GbR, and the Institute of Animation at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Thomas Luft from Konstanz developed the core of the renderer, David & Tatjana Maas were the project's creative producers, and I worked on a node-based, panel-oriented, platform-independent, plug-in-driven, flexible user interface, to act as the renderer's frontend for version 2 of the application.

The data structure for creating nodes and building node connections was extracted from aQtree to form the Node Framework project. The user interface classes were extracted to create frapper – a Framework for Applications – that was used at the Institute of Animation for other applications that required a panel-oriented and platform-independent user interface.

Two films were rendered using the first version of aQtree (then named aquaTree), and another film went into production with aQtree (version 2):

David, Thomas, and I presented aQtree at FMX 2009 (see photos on the right).