[vtkusers] Image set: slices of different plane orientation + different resolution/size

[Markus Neff]

Dear mailinglist readers:

I am evaluating the use of VTK 4.X for my diploma thesis. I began
learning VTK 2 weeks ago, so I have hardly any experience with it (sorry
for that). I bought the "VTK User's Guide" but I couldn't find a
solution for my problem.

I have an application that offers a stack of 2D slices (dim. of a single
slice for example 512x512x1, 8 bit per pixel). I need to get this data
to vtk, manipulate it, volume render it and then send the modified
slices back to the other application.

First I thought of representing this data as "vtkImageData" but there
are two problems with that:

    - The planes used to slice the images out of a volume
       can have different orientation (normals) and origin
      (both described by a 4x4 matrix)
    - The slices may have different resolutions
      (different pixel sizes)

Is there a way of keeping the single slices with their orientation
information and the different resolution and at the same time being able
to volume render the data ?
If there is no such way, how could I generate vtkImageData from my input
(perhaps by generating vtkUnstructuredGrid data and then resampling this
data) ? How can the 4x4 transformation matrices be built into the
pipeline ?


Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance,

Markus Neff