Over the last years, a lot of work has happened to make it easier to use 3D technologies in and with Qt.

I’m now extremely happy to let you know that we can now do a huge step forward towards providing competitive, designer friendly tooling as part of our offering in the future.

NVIDIA did one of the largest contributions ever to Qt. They chose to contribute the whole NVIDIA DRIVE™ Design Studio, a designer friendly 3D UI authoring system, to Qt. NVIDIA DRIVE Design Studio is a well proven product that has been used for production systems in many industries.

The contribution consists of several hundred thousand lines of source code. It consists of a runtime component, designer friendly tooling and a Qt integration. This will allow us to bring state-of-the-art 3D tooling to the whole Qt ecosystem. As the title of this blog post suggests, we do even have a name for it already: Qt 3D Studio.

Have a look at the video below to see it in action:

Our goal is to integrate this closely, so that designers can easily create 3D user interfaces that are easily integrated with the rest of the application written in Qt. The UIs can then also easily be extended using Qt Quick or Qt 3D.

Qt 3D Studio is not meant to replace any of our existing UI technologies (Qt Widgets, Qt Quick or Qt 3D), but will nicely complement them.

There is still a lot of work left to closely integrate the code base and especially the runtime with the rest of Qt. As an example, the UI for the tool is currently using MFC in some parts, so it only works on Microsoft Windows. We are also working on ensuring that the tool and runtime will be fully cross-platform and work on all operating systems and GPUs supported by the rest of Qt.

Qt 3D Studio will be available under both open-source and commercial licensing terms, and will be developed in the open, just as the rest of Qt. But as we have only just received the contribution from NVIDIA, it’ll take use a bit to sort through the source code and mold it into a form that we can publish. So please bear with us for a little while, we’ll keep you posted on all progress.

We’re all extremely excited about this contribution to Qt, and I’d like to close this blog post with a big ‘Thank you!’ to NVIDIA.