Animation using vtk

[Jim Peterson]

I have implemented a scheme or animating vtk pipelines (repeatedly rendering the
pipeline while posting changes to the pipeline objects) which appears to be
thread safe. The technique involves using the StartRender callback of
vtkRenderer to synchronize the updates to the pipline with its execution. My
data collection application collects the changes in a queue which is processed
by the StartRender callback to update the pipeline objects contents outside of
the execution of the pipeline. The only vtk modufication is to the
vtkInteractorStyle to add the Animate state indicator. This state must be
independent of the existing State since we still want to allow interaction with
the animating diagram. The Animation state simply continues the timer/render
procesing when on inspite of the fact no other interaction is active. The
changes are limited to the vtkInteractorStyle with the exception of the OnTimer
method in vtkInteractorStyle and its descendants which needs to Render when
vtkState is Start and vtkAnimState is ON.

This approach appears to wrok for me, has anyone else approached the animation
problem, and of so How? If this approach is acceptable, I would like to submit
the changes as a feature to vtk.

Thanks,
Jim Peterson




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