[vtk-developers] VTK in MacOS Core Animation CALayer

[Joël Spaltenstein]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Core Animation (CA) is Apple's technique to get  
all the cool UI animations you see throughout MacOS and iPhoneOS. The  
core of CA is CALayer, which is an abstraction of some sort of off- 
screen frame buffer. The rest of CA is API to get the OS to  
asynchronously animate rendering properties of the layer, such as it's  
opacity, or transformation matrix and etc... Through what is  
essentially a callback system, the OS requests that the app renders  
the content into the offscreen buffer, and then you can use a very  
slick API to do all sorts of cool animation on that layer. For example  
the sort of result I am trying to achieve is to have the beautiful VTK  
rendering I have on screen flip over to reveal settings. Now that I  
have a vtkCocoaLayer that implements the appropriate callbacks, and a  
vtkCocoaLayerRenderWindow that plays nicely with it, I can do all  
those animations.

Cheers,
Joël

On Oct 8, 2009, at 6:49 AM, Berk Geveci wrote:

> For those of us that are ignorant of the workings of Core Animation,
> can you explain what vtkCocoaLayer and vtkCocoaLayerRenderWindow do?
> The process of contributing code to VTK is mostly informal and usually
> involves finding someone with enough experience and interest to review
> the code and commit it. There are several Mac gurus on this list,
> maybe one of them will be interested. If that doesn't work, the best
> thing to do is to put it in the bug tracker and in time someone will
> find it and will review it. We are considering making this a bit more
> formal in the future. Thank you for considering contributing it to VTK
> and I apologize for not making it easy.
>
> -berk
>
> 2009/10/8 Joël Spaltenstein <spalte at gmail.com>:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have been wanting to get VTK to render into a MacOS Core Animation
>> CALayer. I didn't have any luck finding any info on how to get it  
>> to work,
>> so I went ahead and implemented vtkCocoaLayer and  
>> vtkCocoaLayerRenderWindow
>> classes. I was planning on contributing them back to VTK. Are these  
>> classes
>> that would make sense to add to VTK, and if so what is the process?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Joël
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