Tutorial?

[Olav Egeland]

<x-flowed>Hello Ron and everybody else.
I've been working with vtk for 1.5 years now and it has been a dream.
I like the documentation as it is. Mainly a short documentation on the class 
methods and a few comments in the code makes it very readable. Some 
demanding algorithms are described more complete. So for me it works fine. 
The vtk books are fine and very helpfull when starting.

We developed a system that has got good response in the oil industry.
Our Internet side can be found on 
http://home.sol.no/~haralsun/geocap/index.html

I think the trick for applying vtk in a larger scale is to establish your 
own code style and design suiting your application. Then learn the vtk data 
model and all associated methods and go ahead. We have written meny classes 
that serve as a layer between our own algorithms and vtk objects. We never 
do changes in the vtk source code, but code what we need in our own classes 
using vtk objects as much as we can in nice design patterns.

I hope vtk will still focus on speed improvement in filters and graphics. I 
am a little bit worried about what the effort on parallelism and 
multitreading will do with the stability and complexity as Mr. W.Schroeder 
mentioned a few days ago. To us that is deeply involved in vtk code, 
backward compatibility is of vital importance. So far it works well.

Olav Egeland

GeoCap , Oslo, Norway


>From: "Ron Inbar" <rinbar at netvision.net.il>
>To: "Daniel Gayo Avello" <uov02539 at correo.uniovi.es>,        "vtk" 
><vtkusers at gsao.med.ge.com>
>Subject: Re: Tutorial?
>Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 23:57:31 +0200
>
>Hello Daniel and the rest of you vtkFolks.
>
>The VTK User's Guide does contain some useful information and examples.  In
>my opinion, however, it falls short of serving as a solid reference on VTK.
>It's just not comprehensive enough and it's not organized as a reference
>book.  For example, I tried several times to get a working understanding of
>VTK's image streaming mechanism using the User's Guide, but failed every
>time.  It took me a while just to locate the discussion of this mechanism 
>in
>the guide.  When I found it, it turned out to be in the Developer's Guide
>section, and the level of discussion was accordingly.  I just don't have 
>the
>time to sit down and write my own imaging filter just to understand how
>those work.  If streaming is to improve my ability to use VTK effectively,
>it needs decent documentation.  It took me many hours of frustration,
>several posts to the list and quite a lot of luck to finally come across 
>the
>method SetInputMemoryLimit.  Even now I often come across all sorts 
>behavior
>I don't expect and can't explain.
>
>Currently, my main source of information on VTK is the manual pages, most 
>of
>which are written offhandedly, with many omissions and poor explanations.
>There should be a major improvement in this department, as well.
>
>As things stand now, I feel that poor documentation is, by far, VTK's
>biggest problem, and it's big enough to possibly deter me from using VTK in
>the future.  I'm not sure there's a serious alternative to VTK at the
>moment, but that shouldn't be an excuse for the poor documentation.
>
>I apologize about the harsh tone this time.  I still think VTK is a
>remarkable piece of software, perhaps one of the most remarkable pieces of
>open source software out there today, but it did cause me quite a lot of
>frustration due to the lacking documentation.
>
>I hope this message will be taken in a constructive way.
>
>Ron
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Daniel Gayo Avello <uov02539 at correo.uniovi.es>
>To: vtk <vtkusers at gsao.med.ge.com>
>Sent: Monday, November 15, 1999 01:06
>Subject: Tutorial?
>
>
> >         Hi, everybody! Do you know about a good tutorial or guide about
> > VTK? By the way, has some of you bought the VTK User's Guide from
> > Kitware? Is it good?
> >
> >         Thanks, Dani.
> > --
> > uov02539 at correo.uniovi.es
> >
> > http://drive.to/itneverrains
> >
>
>
>
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