Capsule 3d engine

The key technical aspects of Capsule 3d-engine:

  • Cross-platform support across desktop and embedded environments
  • Photorealistic real-time 3d-model visualization

About cross-platform support

Capsule 3d has been implemented using a high-performance cross-platform application toolkit Qt. Moreover, all 3d visualizations have been implemented using OpenGL to get device independent access to graphics acceleration hardware. With this approach, we have achieved high portability and maximum performance and made professional quality real-time 3d visualization available also for handheld devices.

See this example video of running Capsule 3d viewer on Windows PC, Mac Laptop and Linux phone.

About real-time 3d visualization

Capsule 3d has been designed for devices supporting OpenGL ES 2.0, i.e. majority of the upcoming high-end handheld devices. To achieve photorealistic 3d visualization, we have used all the latest technologies supported by OpenGL ES 2.0. We have also implemented several other types of visualization options for different use cases. The following list explains some of the different techniques we have in place.

  • Fixed, forward and deferred 3d pipelines
  • Several lighting models like per-pixel-phong, per-vertex-phong and lightmapping
  • Shadowing models: shadow volumes and shadow maps.
  • Other visualization options like screen space ambient occlusion and outline-mode

See also the screenshots page to see these features in action.

About 3d format support

Now that open standards, open formats and open source are becoming common in different software industries, the 3d design industry has also adopted a common format, the Collada. In the Capsule 3d project, we decided to focus our efforts on the Collada format only. The 3d engine itself is format agnostic and supports adding new formats.

Other features and roadmap

While developing commercial products based on the engine, here are some of the features we have in our list for the engine itself.
  • Animation support for displaying movement within scenes
  • Level of detail for handling large scenes
  • Physics engine for enabling games and various engineering applications
  • Object picker for disassembling 3d-models
  • Recording functionality for capturing visualization sessions
  • Commenting and reviewing functionality with textual notes
  • Support for selected proprietary 3d file formats
  • 3rd party SDK



If you are interested in Capsule 3d engine, please visit the Contact page.