VTK Info

I've been using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) since it first came out in the 1990s. It's an amazing library for doing vis and it's open source!

WARNING: while VTK is still very much an active project, this page reflects past work and is out of date with the current API.

Looking into VTK 4.0...

Linux

Here are the basic steps I took to get VTK built on Linux (WARNING: archived page).

Java

Here's a simple Java program to display a sphere (based on Paul Hsieh's example sent to the VTK mail list).

sphere.java 

Compile:
% javac sphere.java
Run:
% java sphere

Here are a couple of files that provide a Swing/VTK framework for GUI/rendering:
Viewer.java VTKPanel.java

Files from a Nov. '01 dist of VTK/Wrapping/Java:
vtkPanel.java SimpleVTK.java VText.java

Related links:

Linux Threads FAQ
PThread mutex

Python

I contributed the tcl2py.py Python script which in turn helped translate several of the Tcl scripts to Python that are now available in the VTK package (e.g., graphics/examplesPython).

Linux/Python

borromean.py tknotTube.py moebius.py

A table of toroidal knots.

(you'll want colors.py too)

Scattered data

Here are some experiments showing results of:

Jython

Go here.

GUIs

It's just a matter of time before some snazzy GUIs will be (hopefully) contributed by the large VTK user community. Here are some related links:
  • vtkPipeline.tcl
  • Principia Mathematica (Windows-based)
  • vtkEditor

    Sample code:

    Here's a hack to display PDB files: pdb_v4.cxx. (Thanks to Jean Favre for updating my VTK3.x version to VTK4.x). It only handles the 'ATOM' (or 'HETATM') and 'CONECT' keywords, doesn't *generate* bonds (but displays specified bonds), doesn't scale atoms, etc. For more on Chemistry-related s/w, check out the RasMol & Chime homepage.

    wheel.pdb

    nanotube.pdb caffeine.pdb diffGear.pdb.gz

    fineMotion.pdb.gz

    Go here for more nano-machines.

    Polyhedra

    dodec.py dodecFoldup.py

    Other stuff

    torus.py

    vtkOffScreen

    For those interested in doing offscreen rendering in OpenGL, here's a snapshot (vtkOffScreen.tar.gz) of John Shalf's vtkOpenGLOffscreenRenderWindow class, etc..

    Here's an additional class I found necessary to do textures:
    vtkOpenGLOffscreenTexture.h
    vtkOpenGLOffscreenTexture.cxx

    Here's a more recent version of vtkOpenGLOffscreenRenderWindow that I am using with a nightly version of vtk from ~Sept 12, 2000:
    vtkOpenGLOffscreenRenderWindow.h
    vtkOpenGLOffscreenRenderWindow.cxx
    PyRenderWindow_GetPixelData.cxx - an example of manually Python-wrapping the 'GetPixelData' method.