The issue there is you're running a VFX application on a Mac :P I mean that 50% sarcastically and 50% sympathetically. Apple support has not been stellar the past few years across 3D applications. Not sure when the last time you used their products, but they did go through a redesign and things have improved a fair bit.

From the thread's master:

> The fact is that a viable, efficient, native and cross-platform GUI solution has failed to emerge. Note the word 'viable'. Those who might suggest that Qt covers that role have to explain why, even though it has been capable of fast, attractive apps for a long time, nobody built Slack, Discord, Atom or VSCode in it.

Most industry standard VFX applications utilize Qt for the UI and other application parts. It helps that there was a standards body (admittedly, very Linux biased but starting to open up) set up between vendors and studios for choosing major frameworks/libraries (VFX Reference Platform[0]):

* Autodesk Maya

* Autodesk 3DS Max

* SideFX Houdini

* Foundry Nuke

* Foundry Mari

* Foundry Katana

* Foundry Modo

* Allegorithmic Substance Painter

* Allegorithmic Substance Designer

With the exception of macOS in the very recent years, these applications work pretty seamlessly and efficiently. Qt is not as easy to get up and running with compared to web based frameworks like Electron, it does provide a pretty 'viable' framework for building cross-platform applications. Getting 'native' in appearance will probably never happen 100%, but Qt does a pretty bang-up job. Regarding the apps listed above, they all use custom styling so you get the same interface across all platforms, so native doesn't even matter anymore.

[0] http://vfxplatform.com/

I primarily ran it on my Windows desktop where it worked better (except for being tiny because they hadn’t implemented any sort of UI scaling for high DPI displays, making the 10pt-ish UI font nearly unreadable), so it wasn’t a huge deal, but still was disappointing. Faster CPU and much faster GPU on my desktop, but I’m not always at that computer.

The bigger bummer is that “cross platform” for this sort of thing is only talking about Windows, Linux, and maybe Mac. Substance Designer and Painter would both be outstanding to use on an iPad Pro as long as you had someone on desktop platform feeding you the 3D models.

> except for being tiny because they hadn’t implemented any sort of UI scaling for high DPI displays, making the 10pt-ish UI font nearly unreadable

Designer has had proper Hi-DPI/scaling support since early/mid-2017. Painter has the support, too, but not to the same degree. Apparently it rounds between 100% and 200%, but nothing in between. Although a user said 150% works.

https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,1191.0.html

> The bigger bummer is that “cross platform” for this sort of thing is only talking about Windows, Linux, and maybe Mac.

That I think is between Qt and Apple. Mari 4 came out at the end of last year and the macOS version has been in a perpetual beta since about 6 months after GA, but should arrive with the 4.5 release currently in beta (fingers crossed for those users). As reported by the dev team, it comes down to some serious stability and useability issues from Qt on macOS (the way they've implemented it) that is just not working well between various macOS versions. Some users the beta works fine, others not at all. And this happens to users of the same OS version and hardware.

I was pretty early on the 4K train (mid 2014), of all the things to not adopt that fast, texture editing software was pretty unfortunate. Glad to hear things are better now.

On the platforms, my bigger issue is the complete lack of iOS for these apps more than the iffy Mac support. It would’ve been really good.

Heck, even the Surface Pro would’ve been great if they’d properly supported gestures in the graph view. They didn’t though, and I don’t have a Surface Pro anymore.

>Most industry standard VFX applications utilize Qt for the UI and other application parts.

And most of their UIs look alien and unusable crap only a professional forced to use it would...

I've never seen an application that has a seriously broad range of functionality where I went "Wow. That's amazing." And not just from a visual standpoint, but from a navigation and process perspective.

It always takes a small adjustment period of getting used to the application's actions paradigm and you get over it. The UI's don't really get in the way, and you kind of stop caring about visual appearances after the first few weeks. At the end of the day, it's all panels and buttons. As long as it's internally cohesive and consistent.

>I've never seen an application that has a seriously broad range of functionality where I went "Wow. That's amazing." And not just from a visual standpoint, but from a navigation and process perspective.

Even so, 3D apps have it way worse than pro apps like Photoshop, Cubase, etc with equally "wide range of functionality".

I mainly use AutoCAD at work and I’m constantly thankful that it has a command line still. Hardly touch the UI except for the 3D view and whatever popup windows I summon with commands.

The ribbons thing admittedly is more discoverable, so occasionally I’ll look for something there instead of going straight to google, but once I know what it’s called I’m right back to the command line.