More VTK objects

[John Shalf]

Hi,
this message is just to announce/unload some VTK classes I talked about
at the VTK BOF at Siggraph.

vtkFlRenderWindow
http://infinite-entropy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VTK/vtkFlRenderWindow
FLTK (the Fast Light ToolKit) is a nifty free cross-platform (Windows
and X11) GUI library with a nice graphical GUI editing tool (
http://www.fltk.org ).  This is just a version of the VTK Render Window
which allows you to embed vtk rendering into an FLTK GUI.  It only works
for Unix/Linux/X11 right now.  I wouldn't mind if someone with Windows
expertise ported it to that platform.  Tell me if you do!

vtkOpenGLOffscreenRenderWindow
http://infinite-entropy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VTK/vtkOffScreen
I see there is an offscreen renderer for Win32 in the VTK contrib
directory.  This provides offscreen rendering to Unix people.  For SGI
systems, it takes advantage of the Pixelbuffers (PBuffers) GL extension
for hardware accelerated offscreen rendering.  

vtkHDFReader (also reads NetCDF)
http://infinite-entropy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VTK/vtkHDFReader
HDF4 is a popular platform independent file format for storing
scientific datasets ( http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ ).  HDF4 also
interoperates with NetCDF which is another popular file format created
by Unidata.  This simply reads HDF4 SDS files.  An HDF5 version will be
coming out soon as well. 

vtkSMP
http://infinite-entropy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VTK?vtkSMP
This is a slowly evolving collection of thread-based parallel
visualization filters for VTK.  It uses Posix Threads on most platforms
and sproc() on SGI for performance reasons.  I'm currently releasing the
parallel version of the vtkMarchingCubes and vtkContourFilter, but this
could potentially be used for the streamlines and other
compute-intensive filters in the future (provided it isn't superceded by
vtk3.0 parallel extensions).  Speedups are acceptable for the
vtkContourFilter but still a bit lame for MarchingCubes.  This'll be
evolving over time though as the code gets instrumented.

License is same as VTK... use it and abuse it, but please tell me if you
have an cool bugfixes or additions so it can be incorporated back into
the main source tree.  Thanks!

-john


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