Struggled a few hours to get VTK to do offscreen rendering. I use it to batch process medical images. Without actually producing output on the screen, I still print resulting images in a report to easily review the results of an experiment. Modify Mesa-4.0.4/Make-config in the 'linux:' target the following vars: GL_LIB = libVTKMesaGL.so GLU_LIB = libVTKMesaGLU.so GLUT_LIB = libVTKMesaglut.so GLW_LIB = libVTKMesaGLw.so OSMESA_LIB = libOSVTKMesa.so In Mesa 6.2.

Given the fact that VTK is a software toolkit, it cannot be the subject of FDA approval as a medical device. We have discussed this topic in several occasions and received advice from FDA representatives, that can be summarized as follow: VTK is to be considered as an off-the-shelf (OTS) product that is used for supporting a higher level medical application/product. See similar questions...

We have heard people say that VTK is really slow. In many of these cases, changing a few parameters can make a huge difference in performance. If you find that VTK is slower than other visualization systems running the same problem first take a look at the FAQ section dealing with large data: How to handle large data sets in VTK. Many of its suggestions will improve VTK's performance significantly for many datasets. See similar questions...

Many VTK sources and filters cache information and will not perform as expected when used in multiple threads. When writing a multithreaded filter, the developer has to be very careful about how she accesses data. For example, GetXXX() methods which return a pointer should only be used to read. If the pointer returned by these methods are used to change data in multiple threads (without mutex locks), the result will most probably be wrong and unpredictable. See similar questions...

STL is for implementation, not interface. All STL references should be contained in a .cxx class or the private section of the .h header file. Use the PIMPL idiom to forward reference/contain STL classes in heavily used superclasses. STL is big, fat, and slow to compile so we do not want to include STL headers in any .h files that are included by most of VTK, e.g. vtkObject.h vtkSource.h etc. In the . See similar questions...

This is not strictly one hundred percent true. If you give us a character's strong emotional reaction to some cataclymic event that was simply unproduceable, you can have something important happen offscreen. TV is like theater in that it is more about people's reactions to big events than the big events themselves. See similar questions...

ParaView 2.4 and older support volume rendering of unstructured grid data sets. ParaView 2.6 will support parallel volume rendering of image data. See similar questions...

There is also a newsgroup that mirrors the mailinglist. At this point it seems that mirror is down. Mail to the mailinglist used to be posted the newsgroup, but posts on the newsgroup were not sent to the mailinglist. The newsgroup was located at: news://scully.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/vtk.mailinglist http://www.gmane.org is a bidirectional mail-to-news gateway that carries the vtkusers mailing list. Its located here: news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.vtk.user or here: http://news.gmane.org/gmane. See similar questions...

The answers to the exercises of the textbook used to be maintained by Martin Stoufer (kudos), and will be made available by Kitware in the near future. See similar questions...

Download the source code and/or binaries (available on Windows) and work through the examples (there are 400-500 examples). To learn the innards of VTK, you can attend a VTK course or sponsor a VTK course at your site through Kitware. http://www.kitware.com/products/index.html See similar questions...

Currently we recommend that you use Tcl/Tk 8.2.3 with VTK. This is the best-supported version combination at this time. Tcl/Tk 8.3.4 has been tested to a limited extent but seems to have more memory leaks that Tcl 8.3.2 has. Tcl/Tk 8.4.x seems to work well with VTK too, but you might have to change a couple of configuration settings depending on the version of VTK you are using. Check the Does VTK support Tcl/Tk 8.4?. See similar questions...

VTK should compile and run on most versions of Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It has been tested on Suns, SGIs, HPs, Alphas, RS6000s and many Windows and Mac workstations. VTK uses OpenGL to perform almost all of its rendering and some graphics cards/drivers have better support for OpenGL than others. This is not a listing of what cards perform well. It is a listing of what cards actually produce correct results. Here is a list of cards and their status roughly in best to worst order. See similar questions...

It is not a "real world" benchmark, but provide synthetic results comparing different hardware running VTK: See similar questions...

Read http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/paraview/2003-September/000290.html Adding a filter is very similar to adding readers. Read ParaView/GUI/Client/Resources/Filters.xml and ParaView/Servers/ServerManager/Resources/filters.xml in the source distribution. These are the default filters config files for ParaView. See similar questions...

For VTK 5.0.3 and older, the short answer is "no". For VTK CVS the short answer is "mostly". Work is being done to improve this situation. See similar questions...

A Rendering is the process of taking a collection of shapes, text, and images and figuring out what colors the pixels should be on a screen or printer. In the Java 2D API, the Graphics2D class is the rendering engine: the Graphics2D object contains state attributes, such as color, and applies these attributes to the primitives when rendering them to various output devices. paint, which represents the color or pattern rendered to the destination for the text and shape draw and fill methods. See similar questions...

You can view the current regression test results at: http://public.kitware.com/dashboard.php?name=vtk VTK uses Dart to perform builds, run tests, and generate dashboards. You can find more information about Dart at: http://public.kitware.com/Dart/ You can help improve the quality of VTK by supplying the authors with Tcl scripts that can be used as or turned into regression tests. A good regression test will: See similar questions...

You just built VTK with Python support and everything went smoothly. After you install everything and try running a Python-VTK script you get a traceback with this error: ValueError: method requires a VTK object. This error occurs if you have two copies of the VTK libraries on your system. These copies need not be in your linkers path. The VTK libraries are usually built with an rpath flag (under *nix). This is necessary to be able to test the build in place. See similar questions...

The following table identifies the file formats that VTK can read and write. Importer and Exporter classes move full scene information into or out of VTK. Reader and Writer classes move just geometry. dagger; See the books [http://www.kitware.com/products/vtktextbook.html The Visualization Toolkit, An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics] or the User's Guide for details about structured grid and poly data file formats. See similar questions...

dagger; A typical example of use is: # Image pipeline reader = vtkImageReader() reader.SetDataByteOrderToBigEndian() reader.SetDataExtent(0,511,0,511,0,511) reader.SetFilePrefix("Ser397") reader.SetFilePattern("%s/I.%03d") reader.SetDataScalarTypeToUnsignedShort() reader.SetHeaderSize(5432) Sometimes when debugging you need to print an object to a string, either for logging purposes, or in the case of windows applications, to a window. See similar questions...