[vtkusers] VTK + Windows -> Commerical App - Feasibility ??

[Ketan Mehta]

Hi All ( Prabhu, Tom(2), Leila, Wen-Hsing etc  )

I take it that VTK is feasible and vialble solution.

I will try to summarize our discussion for our benefits. May be one more 
mail, sorry for it. ( Hope none minds putting your own words back ! )

How VTK stands on various issues...

Support:
--------
The sad truth is that AVS5, AVS/Express, OpenDX, PVWave, TGS only have one
or two developers maintaining them, if that! From the changelogs I've read
there are more people contributing to VTK than all the other Viz toolkits
put together.

Other Alternates:
----------------
TeraRecon (as far as I understand their product line) offers complete 
end-user solutions, not toolkits. The exception to this is VLI which is the 
library they have to support their VolumePro boards

You can try downloading VolView 1.3 from the Kitware web pages - this uses 
mostly VTK (except for the GUI code obviously) so you can see the 
performance of VTK for displaying images, rendering volumes and surfaces, 
etc. "Slow" and "Fast" are subject to interpretation, 

Voxar : No ideas.

Expertise:
----------
I would assume that most of your problems will go away once 
you have a deeper understanding of the toolkit.

The other toolkits also require extensive modification for most commercial
projects. Apart from custom I/O routines we're using stock VTK and most of
the app customization work is in the MFC GUI.

Other than that, all I can say is like others I am grateful that I do not 
have to deal with openGL directly.

Speed/Memory:
-------------
I've built the same windows GIS visualization app in AVS/Express and MFC/VTK
and the VTK version has a much lighter footprint.

Our clients (medical researchers mostly) have been using my software for a while and so 
far I have got very good comments

Cost:
-----
All the viz companies, AVS, TGS, IBM, Visual Numerics all made small
fortunes during the workstation boom of the 80s and 90s. The SDKs used to
sell for 40-50K, runtimes 2-5K !!!!
 [ Not sure which boom time ]

we use vtk + QT and compile the code using VC++6 for running on
WIN. Since vtk and QT are multi-platform capable (I mean WIN, LINUX,
Mac), it is highly likely that we could compile the same code on LINUX
or Mac, without or with only minor modifications. See the following
links for details about Vtk+Mac and QT:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/06/28/data_visualization.html
http://www.trolltech.com

Commercial / Wide usage Apps:
-----------------------------
I have built my own medical application using VTK and some of Atamai 
classes plus my own vtk classes for viewing/segmentation/surface 
rendering/ signal to noise ratio calculation etc of mice 
(MR/CT/Ultrasound) images here at our Centre.

We have complete commercial apps with vtk, which run either
as a stand-alone Windows-application or embedded in a web-browser for
visualizing data online from a remote SQL-server.  lots of GIS
maps along with isosurfaces of concentration data, and at the same time
drape very-high-resolution aerial photo (some 100's MB) over irregular
ground surface created by using DEM data (Digital Elevation Model) from
the US Geological Survey.

We use Vtk as the underlying 3D visualization engine for our 3D Windows 
which do both terrain and thematic visualization.
We deal with very large datasets, database tables and DEM files. You always
have to know your data prior to actually loading it into any visualizaiton
system.
Our product ships in 18 laguages and sells worldwide on many different
configurations and we hav enot run into any issues that were not easily
overcome with slight modifications to Vtk. If your interested check out the
web page for our product:
        http://www.mapinfo.com/products/Features.cfm?ProductID=1044

VTK Rocks !!
-----------
I find Vtk to be a great tool that easily extensible, powerful, and capable
to handle a professional shipping products workload.

Tom Citriniti wrote:
> PPS. Vtk Rocks ;-)

 
Thanks
Ketan

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