[vtkusers] Mesa / VTK problems

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

>>>>> "BP" == Brian Paul <brian_e_paul at yahoo.com> writes:

    >> I also see random disappearance of actors

    BP> What is an "actor"?

Sorry, an actor is a standard term used in VTK for a vtkActor.  Here
is part of the vtkActor docs graphics/vtkActor.h:

   vtkActor is used to represent an entity in a rendering scene.  It
   inherits functions related to the actors position, and orientation
   from vtkProp. The actor also has scaling and maintains a reference
   to the defining geometry (i.e., the mapper), rendering properties,
   and possibly a texture map. vtkActor combines these instance
   variables into one 4x4 transformation matrix as follows: [x y z 1]
   = [x y z 1] Translate(-origin) Scale(scale) Rot(y) Rot(x) Rot (z)
   Trans(origin) Trans(position)


Basically anything that is rendered on screen is typically a vtkActor
object - we call these 'actors' for short.  So what I meant is that
when I have scenes constructed with various actors, sometimes a
particular actor simply disappears when I do something.  Unfortunately
I am not able to duplicate this.  FWIW I'd like to add that this was
very bad with Mesa 3.1 but is much better with 3.4.  I havent tried
mesa 4.0 yet.

    BP> I'm building from the vtk32-src-unix.tgz source archive but I
    BP> have no idea where to get the (non-RPM) "data files" from.
    >>  Go to http://public.kitware.com/VTK/get-software.php and grab
    >> the data files there the files are of the form: vtk20data.part*

    BP> Is there a mirror ftp from which I can get these files?  The
    BP> kitware ftp site has been _really_ slow (1KB/s).

I am not sure there is a mirror for the data. :(

prabhu