There is a feature I really like in qt creator and it is the Shadow build. When the Shadow Build is on, all the generated files (*.moc, Makefile, *.o) will be generated in a giv
AFAIK what QtCreator does, basically boils down to this:
mkdir my_shadow_build
cd my_shadow_build
qmake ../my_src_dir
this creates the Makefile itself in the build directory and simply running
make
there creates all temporary files under the build directory, using the sources from the original directory. This does not require any special stuff in the .pro file but just depends on the usage "from the outside".