Dock QtWidget to Unreal

Development Pipeline & Plugins Editor Scripting
1

Is there a way to dock a Qt Widget to an Editor UI?

2

I don’t think you can use Qt framework inside Unreal Engine 4 editor without heavily modifying the engine, and honestly I don’t know why you want to do that. Slate is a really powerful UI framework and also there is now the possibility to create UMG Editor Widget.

3

We use PySide in Unreal so basically Qt. Can’t answer regarding to docking the widgets so would be interesting if someone have experience doing this.


window = None # Required to be a global variable due to Unreals garbage collector
def main():
    app = None
    if not QApplication.instance():
        app = QApplication(sys.argv)

    global window
    window = MyWidget()

    unreal.parent_external_window_to_slate(window.winId())
    window.show()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
4

Yeah, we are using it in a similar fashion, but without setting the winId

However, didn’t find a good way of docking.

There are many reasons why you would wan’t to use pyqt in unreal. For instance, if you already have a tool that is written in pyqt and wan’t to integrate it into unreal. Furthermore, there is not a lot of information about custom UI’s about Unreal, I wouldn’t know how to replicate a full-blown pyqt interface like treeviews/tabs/modifiers.

5

The Slate UI framework (which is the same framework that powers UE4 Editor) is pretty solid in terms of widgets and features, however is not well documented. I usually dig into the UE4 Editor code to understand how to use its API.

I can tell you that you can dock any kind of custom widget (SCoumpondWidget) using the FGlobalTabmanager singleton instance, create a SDockTab widget and set your custom widget as its content. I don’t know if you can somehow bridge a PyQt widget as content for a SDockTab.
As for TreeViews there is a widget called STreeView that is used widely in the Editor, the ContentBrowser and WorldOutliner use that.