Hi,
I wonder if it is valuable to develop with Qt these days. How relevant is Qt in the production pipeline for video games? How much is it used in app development generally?
I assume many in-engine tools needed would be developed with ImGui, but since I have only been involved with indie games so far, I wonder if mid-sized studios generally use Qt.
My background is as a 2D Artist, interface, and game designer, and I have worked in these roles for 9 years. However, I have been learning to program (in C#, C++, GLSL) for the last 1-2 years and have developed prototypes with Unity (and a bit in Unreal). I recently started getting into real-time VFX and want to do Tech Art long-term once I acquire enough skills for that.
Since the games industry can be a rough industry at times, I wouldn’t mind having skills in my back pocket that could be used for regular software development/design like Qt.
If you check the site you’ll see there’s a good deal of QT talk; it’s an industry standard these days (particularly since it’s built in to Maya) and it’s good thing to have on your resume.
I have been occasionally heard to complain that TAs spend too much time on QT stuff and get distracted from solving actual production problems… but that’s just me
Thanks for your reply! I did search the forum but did not find many recent posts here and none that were talking about how it is actually used in production. Perhaps I searched for the wrong words.
I’d say that practically, Qt is only “worth learning” insofar as you are able to solve problems with it.
Unity and Unreal they have their own UI frameworks you’d need to learn. Many in-house custom engine tools use WinForms in C#. ImGui is actually used less often outside of small custom engines because retained-mode UI frameworks (like Qt or WinForms) tend to scale better. (Immediate Mode vs. Retained Mode)
However, if you are working with Maya or Houdini, you can get big benefit out of using Qt since it’s built into the app and much more flexible than the alternatives. Qt is used quite a lot for pipeline tools at both small and large studios which predominantly work with Maya, which is… most of them. Every TA I’ve worked with has used Qt at some point to solve a problem.
If you plan to be working with realtime VFX, I’d say that learning Qt would be a huge benefit if you’re working in Maya to set up your meshes for shaders (for example, a tool to bake vertex world-positions to vertex colors, or scatter objects to prepare for a texture bake). That being said, don’t learn it as “head knowledge” just because you feel like you should. Learn it by applying it to solve a problem.
