[vtkusers] 3D/4D Drawing - Should I interface to Vtk?

[Paul Welton]

This posting is to announce the availability of an interactive tool for
3D/4D drawing named the "TSIPP Workbench".  The tool is an [Incr Tcl]
program, and the underlying toolkit is SIPP, the SImple Polygon
Processor interfaced to Tcl via TSIPP, an interface developed by Mark
Diekhans.

So what has this to do with Vtk? Well one future direction for the tool
would be to exploit graphics hardware through OpenGL/Mesa, and Vtk
appears to be the ideal route to doing this.  The objective of my
posting is to solicit advice and opinions on whether this development is
useful, and if so, to encourage collaboration.  The software itself (it
is covered by GPL) can be downloaded from:

http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/ftparchive/sorted/graphics/TSIPPwb/1.4
http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/ftparchive/sorted/graphics/TSIPPwb/1.4s

You will find HTML documentation, and all binaries necessary to run on
Linux. The "supplementary" download contains extra examples which could
not be contained in the main file due to size limitations on this
repository.

A presentation on the TSIPP Workbench was made at the O'Reilly Open
Source Convention in San Diago on 26th July.  You can download the
presentation slides (Star Office 5.2) and the paper itself (PDF) from:

ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/conference/os2001/welton_072601.sdd
ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/conference/os2001/tcl_papers/welton_tcl2001_J.pdf

The slides were produced with the TSIPP Workbench and post-processed
with the GIMP. The motivation for creating this tool is that while there
are many packages for rendering and processing 3D images, support for
creating 3D drawings and animating them interactively is limited. The
tool also aims to create new Tk widgets through drawing which appear as
3D scenes and represent information, for example the state of an
industrial process; hence the projects sub-title, "Working Widgets
Without Code".

Paul Welton