VTK -> image file without window.

[Matt Howlett]

Hi,

I'm using OpenGL (not Mesa) on Digital Unix. From what I gather, I can't
use this to do what I want since I need to get a window up before I can
get the contents of it into an array. I have no experience with Mesa, does
anyone know if I can render without a window using this? I 'spose I'll
take a look at it and try and find out. If not maybe I can easily modify
it. I only want to volume render, maybe I can write a
vtkArrayRenderWindow, and modify a minimal set of other classes to achieve
this. Again I haven't looked into it. Both these ideas seem like a lot of
work, so before delving in myself, I thought I'd check if anyone else had
tried to do a similar thing. 

Thanks in advance for any pointers,
Matt Howlett.

On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Randy Heiland wrote:

> You didn't mention what kind of system you're running, and what graphics pkg
> you're using (OpenGL, Mesa, SGI??)
> 
> Randy


>I've been using vtk for volume rendering, which for large datasets is
>either not real time or is at a very poor resolution. I would like to be
>able to render directly to an array (without opening a window) so that I
>can write an MPI program to run on multiple computers each calculating
>from a different camera pos. Before delving into the source code and
>trying to hack up a RenderWindow to do the job (i'm assuming this is what
>I should do...), I was wondering if anyone else had solved this problem
>(of volume rendering to an array).

>My ultimate plan is to explore the data at a very poor resolution, then
do
>a multi node render of each frame in the exploration at a high
resolution,
>then play back the movie. 



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