Over the past years, we have encountered a number of issues with Gestaltor 1.0 that have warranted a complete overhaul of key components of the software. In this short blog post, I would like to explain where we are coming from and what we have changed in Gestaltor 2.0 to give you a better experience and more powerful tools.

The online shop​

The Gestaltor 1.0 shop was based on WooCommerce for Wordpress and gave most of our users a suboptimal experience when it came to the ordering process and especially the license management. Things that should be simple, like cancelling your subscription were hard, the built in license server would be too restrictive and we were lacking flexibility in offering different license models to you, our customers.

Therefore we have decided to completely revamp the entire shop and license management system and are now happy to use paddle together with keygen to provide a much smoother experience with a lot more flexibility for you. Unfortunately, this means that existing licenses can't easily be transferred to the new system, but we are happy to help you with that. Just reach out to us and we will find a solution.

The front end​

Gestaltor 1.0 used Qt Widgets written in C++ for the front end. This was a good choice when we started the project, but over the years we have seen that a C++ based user interface was limiting our ability to quickly iterate on new features and to provide a modern experience. To avoid ditching the entire code base and starting from scratch, we have decided to use Qt Quick for the front end of Gestaltor 2.0. This allows us to keep the existing C++ code base and to gradually replace the old Qt Widgets with modern QML components. Additionally, this allows us to quickly integrate new glTF extensions by generating some parts of the UI dynamically, even extending Gestaltor with extensions that are private to your company at runtime.

The back end​

Gestaltor's core component is the modelling of the glTF file format with various operations that allow users to modify the glTF without violating the specification. While providing a GUI with Gestaltor has been incredibly helpful for many users, we have also seen that some users would like to use the core functionality in their own applications and especially in a scriptable way. Therefore we have decided to split the glTF operations and data model into separate modules that can be used independently of the GUI via both a C++ and a Python API. Contact us if you have any repetitive tasks to automate, we can quickly add new operations to the UI or give you access to the Python scripting interface.

The future​

We are excited to have Gestaltor 2.0 out in the wild and are looking forward to your feedback. We have a lot of ideas for new features and improvements and are looking forward to working with you to make Gestaltor the best tool for working with glTF files.

Feel free to reach out to us via email support@ux3d.io or join our new Discord community discord.gg/aE72kjGc