QGraphics vector graphics interfaces with Python and PySide6

testv September 27, 2024

0 11 12 minutes read

The Qt Graphics View Framework allows you to develop fast and efficient 2D vector graphic scenes. Scenes can contain millions of items, each with their own features and behaviors. By using the Graphics View via PySide6 you get access to this highly performant graphics layer in Python. Whether you’re integrating vector graphics views into an existing PySide6 application, or simply want a powerful vector graphics interface for Python, Qt’s Graphics View is what you’re looking for.

Some common uses of the Graphics View include data visualization, mapping applications, 2D design tools, modern data dashboards and even 2D games.

In this tutorial we’ll take our first steps looking at the Qt Graphics View framework, building a scene with some simple vector items. This will allow us to familiarize ourselves with the API and coordinate system, which we’ll use later to build more complex examples.

The Graphics View Framework

The Graphics View framework consists of 3 main parts QGraphicsView, QGraphicsScene, and QGraphicsItem, each with different responsibilities.

The framework can be interpreted using the Model-View paradigm, with the QGraphicsScene as the Model and the QGraphicsView as the View. Each scene can have multiple views.
The QGraphicsItems within the scene can be considered as items within the model, holding the visual data that the scene combines to define the complete image.

QGraphicsScene is the central component that glues everything together. It acts as a whiteboard on which all items are drawn (circles, rectangles, lines, pixmaps,
etc). The QGraphicsView has the responsibility of rendering a given scene — or part of it, with some transformation (scaling, rotating, shearing) — to display it to the user. The view is a standard Qt widget and can be placed inside any Qt layout.

QGraphicsScene provides some important functionalities out of the box, so we can use them to develop advanced applications without struggling with low-level details. For example —

Collision Detection, detect a graphics item is collided with another item.
Item Selection, gives us the ability to deal with multiple items at the same time, for example, the user can select multiple items, and when pressing delete, a function asks the scene to give the list for all selected items, and then delete them.
Items discovery, the scene can tell us what items are present (or part of them) at a specific point or inside some defined region, for example, if the user adds an item that intersects with a forbidden area, the program will detect them and give them another (mostly red) color.
Events Propagation, the scene receives the events and then propagates them to items.

To define a QGraphicsScene you define it’s boundaries or sceneRect which defines the x & y origins and dimensions of the scene. If you don’t provide a sceneRect it will default to the minimum bounding rectangle for all child items — updating as items are added, moved or removed. This is flexible but less efficient.

Items in the scene are represented by QGraphicsItem objects. These are the basic building block of any 2D scene, representing a shape, pixmap or SVG image to be displayed in the scene. Each item has a relative position inside the sceneRect and can have different transformation effects (scale, translate, rotate, shear).

Finally, the QGraphicsView is the renderer of the scene, taking the scene and displaying it — either wholly or in part — to the user. The view itself can have transformations (scale, translate, rotate and shear) applied to modify the display without affecting the underlying scene. By default the view will forward mouse and keyboard events to the scene allowing for user interaction. This can be disabled by calling view.setInteractive(False).

A simple scene

Let’s start by creating a simple scene. The following code creates QGraphicsScene, defining a 400 x 200 scene, and then displays it in a QGraphicsView.

python

import sys
from PySide6.QtWidgets import QGraphicsScene, QGraphicsView, QApplication

app = QApplication(sys.argv)

# Defining a scene rect of 400x200, with it's origin at 0,0.
# If we don't set this on creation, we can set it later with .setSceneRect
scene = QGraphicsScene(0, 0, 400, 200)

view = QGraphicsView(scene)
view.show()
app.exec()

If you run this example you’ll see an empty window.

The empty graphics scene, shown in a QGraphicsView window.

Not very exciting yet — but this is our QGraphicsView displaying our empty scene.