The project Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) 7.5.0 is now available and includes more than 400 improvements and fixes. The new features include the 3D Draw Harness viewer, which allows you to navigate through large life-size models, including teleportation-style navigation when viewed in virtual reality.
The data exchange functionality has been expanded with glTF 2.0 write support.
For those who are unfamiliar with Open CASCADE, they should know that provides a geometry modeling engine for programs like FreeCAD, KiCAD, Netgen, gmsh, CadQuery, and pyOCCT.
The project has been in development for over twenty years and includes a suite of software development tools and libraries focused on 3D modeling and computer-aided design (CAD). As of version 6.7.0, the OCCT source code is licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1 license.
About the new version of Open CASCADE 7.5.0
In this new version, the new rendering functions include additional texture maps to improve visual quality, the correct rendering of sRGB output for translucent materials and gradient processing, and a metallic roughness PBR process to improve the rendering of metallic objects.
Unicode character support has been extended with improvements related to the STEP translator, the DRAW console, the message resources and the visualization.
New examples are provided to demonstrate the use of an OCCT 3D viewer, compiled in WebAssembly format, to run in a browser. The structure of the documentation has been revised, in which a new "Contribution" section has been created. An updated OCCT developer portal will be available soon.
In addition to this, it is highlighted that:
- Changed the progress indicator API for parallel tasks.
- Added support for compiling to WebAssembly pseudocode (with Emscripten SDK).
- A new Message_PrinterSystemLog class has been implemented to write messages to the system log.
Modeling:
- BRepMesh progress bar support
- New Alternative Algorithm for Two-Dimensional Polygons Triangulation
- Tool to remove interior subforms (with INTERIOR orientation) of a shape while maintaining topological connectivity
- Multidimensional compound arguments are allowed for Boolean Cut and Common operations.
Display:
- SRGB textures and a render buffer
- PBR metallic roughness for rendering shadows on metal
- Normal map texture support
- Ability to calculate BVH trees used for interactive selection in a background thread
- Support for custom style font families and multi-font .ttc files in the font manager.
Data exchange:
- Support for reading STEP files containing non-Ascii characters (Unicode or local code pages) in text strings
- Support for writing Unicode text strings in STEP (such as UTF-8)
- New STEP read API that accepts C ++ stream as input
- GlTF 2.0 export
- Improved performance of reading (ASCII) of STL and OBJ files.
Application framework:
- Manage multiple documents (open, save, close, etc.) in parallel threads (one application per thread)
- Inheritance of attributes for the reuse of their persistence mechanisms
- Progress indicator in TDocStd_Application
- Commit operation optimization for large modifications.
- Multi-color message display
- Support for Unicode characters in the DRAW console on Windows
- Flight mode navigation in 3D viewer with WASD keys and 3D mouse in Windows
- Experimental navigation in teleportation mode in 3D viewer using OpenVR.
How to install Open CASCADE?
For those who are interested in being able to install this tool on their system, they should know that Open CASCADE has a version for both Windows and Linux.
So, for any of the cases, Can download the new version from the link below.
It is important to mention that In the case of Linux, the new version must be built from source Or the other option is to wait for this new version of Open CASCADE 7.5.0 to be updated within the official channels of your distribution.
As at the moment it is already available for Arch Linux Therefore, users of this distro, as well as its derivatives, can install Open CASCADE from a terminal by typing:
sudo pacman -S opencascade