[vtkusers] Sections with some cutting functions at the same time

[Carlos Martinez Burgos]

Hi all.

I have to apply some cutting planes to some actors at the same time, to do
a section of my view. In this section I want to get the surface cutted
like with vtkClipPolyData and the section like with vtkCutter joined in
one actor.

Furthermore, I want to activate or deactivate the planes individually and
change their position and normal, updating the section.

I wish to know if there is a simple method to do this in VTK. Now I do it
(in java) with vectors (like arrays) for clippers, cutters, strippers,
cuttedPolys, triangleFilters and appendedPolyDatas, making loops like this.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

               planes
                 |
                 v
      surface->clipper                                     ->appendedPoly1->
             ->cutter->stripper->cuttedPoly->triangleFilter->

appendedPoly1->clipper                                     ->appendedPoly2->
             ->cutter->stripper->cuttedPoly->triangleFilter->

appendedPoly2->clipper                                     ->appendedPoly3->
             ->cutter->stripper->cuttedPoly->triangleFilter->

appendedPoly3->mapper->actor

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I apply this to each actor to get the section of all surfaces on the view.

Now I get good results with this method because I use a few surfaces, but
I'm afraid that this consumes too much resources on a real case because I
have a lot of objects for each section and a lot of surfaces.

I have tried to use vtkImplicitBoolean to join the planes before doing the
cuts but I haven't got good results in the shape of the objects.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

planes->implicitBoolean
             |
             v
 surface->clipper                                     ->appendedPoly->
        ->cutter->stripper->cuttedPoly->triangleFilter->

appendedPoly->mapper->actor

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The question is if have somebody tried another method to apply the same
section to a group of surfaces getting the inner surface and the projection
of the section on the planes for each surface.

Thanks a lot.

-- 
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Carlos Martínez Burgos      |     Instituto Tecnológico de Informática
Ingeniero Informático       |      Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Tlf: +34 963877237          |                        Camí de Vera, S/N
cmarbur at iti.upv.es          |                   46071 Valencia - Spain
www.iti.upv.es/~cmarbur     |                           www.iti.upv.es
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