It’s been well over a year since we released SpeedTree® Cinema and Studio for all three desktop platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux). However, we still occasionally run into people with the misconception that SpeedTree is just for Windows. This is no longer the case!
Game development is largely conducted on Windows, so admittedly this is where SpeedTree was focused for almost a decade. When we decided to make the SpeedTree tools available to a larger market, we knew we would need to start supporting a Mac OS X version for the artists that live there. We also came to learn that many visual effects studios tend to work primarily in Linux, and we definitely wanted to get them interested in SpeedTree. So, when we released SpeedTree Cinema and Studio in 2011, we went fully cross platform.
We wanted to maintain a consistent GUI across all platforms, which actually required rewriting large portions of the SpeedTree Modeler. We decided pretty early on to switch the application framework to Qt (http://qt-project.org/), as it is becoming a standard for cross-platform applications. We also let our artists loose by designing the new dark theme for the Modeler. The process of porting was not without bumps in the road, but I think we’ve been pretty successful in providing a consistent user experience across all the platforms, as you can see below.
Click each screen image below to see what SpeedTree Modeler’s user interface looks like in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
