[vtkusers] [DEMO] amira and Teaching Visualization with VTK

[Dave Reed]

> From: Sebastien BARRE <seb-ml-vtk at barre.nom.fr>
> 
> Hi all
> 
> Well, I just fell into a visualization software that left me breathless 
> (I've been playing with it for a couple of hours).
> 
> It's called Amira : http://www.amiravis.com/
> 
> There is a demo for download.
> 
> It seems to be internally organized just like VTK (object-oriented, 
> pipelined, Tcl commands), but it's not as featured as our beloved toolkit 
> (moreover, it's not open), but has interesting feature lacking VTK 
> (tetragen, blazing hedgehog animation, etc.)
> 
> On the other side, it seems *really* fast, refresh rates seem better, and 
> transparency is definitely handled better. Some of the tutorials are just 
> amazing, and incredibly easy to manage.
> 
> And of course, it's a full featured GUI software. If only we could have a 
> big and serious GUI front-end to demonstrate the power of VTK ;)

<rest of message snipped>

Is there any GUI front end for VTK out there?  I've been toying with
the idea of starting to create one using Python and GTK (pygtk).  I
teach so I was thinking about working on it next summer (already have
a project I have to work on this summer) and was going to see if there
was interest in one sometime early next year, but since you brought it
up, I'll ask now.

I've seen programs like AVS and SGI's (they've since sold it I
believe) Explorer package, but never used them so I would probably
want to talk to someone who has used these before going too far.  I've
got some ideas for how to do it, but haven't written any code other
than a simple test to see if one of my ideas is feasible.

While I'm writing, has anyone on this list taught a visualization
course using VTK and willing to correspond via e-mail?  I know of at
least one or two people who have, but I'm specifically interested in
people who have taught a visualization course with VTK geared for
students who are not necessarily CS majors (e.g., some students might
be CS majors, some might be chemistry or physics major who have had a
couple programming courses, but are not skilled enough to write their
own visualization code from scratch within a semester).

-- 
David Reed, Ph.D.                   e-mail: dreed at capital.edu
Math/Computer Science Dept.         http://capital2.capital.edu/faculty/dreed
Capital University                  phone:  614-236-6133
2199 E. Main St.                    fax:    614-236-6518
Columbus, OH 43209