[vtkusers] VTK or OpenGL directly?

[ALIZIER Julien AUSY]

Julian,

> Yeah, I looked at Paraview last week but seem to remember that it was an
app
> in its own right?

Right, Paraview is a full application. I was pointing this in case you don't

really have to write your own viewer. It uses VTK so it is a good start to
see
what VTK can do.

> Plus I want to support Windows and as a bonus, want to use VB if poss.

It works flawless on Windows (I am developping plugins for it with VC++) 
and also on Linux and Solaris.
I don't have any ideas on how to use VTK from VB.

> We already have code to write FEA data to vtk files - BTW what codes do
you
> support?

Well, so if yo have vtk files, have you tried to load them into ParaView? 
If you don't really need a special application then you're done!

> We have written for Algor, Ansys, I-Deas, and are working on FEMAP,
Patran.
> Perhaps we could share documentation???

I am supporting a code that is very specific. Thank for the offer anyway.

Just to get an idea, it took me 3 weeks to write a simple plugin to
ParaView/VTK 
in C++ (the ParaView book did not exist at this time) and nearly 2 months
to really understand what was going on underneath my VTK code (quite a while
but it was worth the effort!).

-- Julien


-----Message d'origine-----
De : Julian Holt [mailto:jholt at cadfem.com]
Envoyé : mardi 22 mars 2005 12:09
À : ALIZIER Julien AUSY; vtkusers at vtk.org
Objet : RE: [vtkusers] VTK or OpenGL directly?


Hi Julien

Yeah, I looked at Paraview last week but seem to remember that it was an app
in its own right?

Plus I want to support Windows and as a bonus, want to use VB if poss.

We already have code to write FEA data to vtk files - BTW what codes do you
support?

We have written for Algor, Ansys, I-Deas, and are working on FEMAP, Patran.
Perhaps we could share documentation???

Thanks

Julian

-----Original Message-----
From: ALIZIER Julien AUSY [mailto:julien.alizier-ausy at irsn.fr]
Sent: 22 March 2005 11:07
To: 'Julian Holt'; vtkusers at vtk.org
Subject: RE: [vtkusers] VTK or OpenGL directly?


Hi,

Maybe you can just use ParaView (www.paraview.org), it's fairly easy and
very powerful.
You'd just need to write out your FE data into a vtk text file (that's easy
too) and load it into the viewer.

I've already done this and it took me half a day ;-)

HTH
-- Julien


-----Message d'origine-----
De : Julian Holt [mailto:jholt at cadfem.com]
Envoyé : mardi 22 mars 2005 11:41
À : vtkusers at vtk.org
Objet : [vtkusers] VTK or OpenGL directly?


Guys

This might be a strange question but hey.....

I am writing a FE viewer and I am looking at VTK and various other "OGL
wrappers"

But......

I am wondering if infact VTK is NOT the way to go?

Basically all I need to do is render 3 and 4 sided polygons with scalar
values at vertex points and then provide 3D rotation + interrogation.

Now VTK does all this (and more) but as a newbie it seems to me that if I am
going to dive off and learn yet another API then why not just learn the
OpenGL API?

I.E code OGL directly and forget wrapper apps.

VTK obviously does a lot of other cool stuff (grid generation etc) but I
don't need to do that because my meshes are built in external FE codes. I am
only interested in display/viewing stuff.

Having taken an OGL book home last night to read whilst watching tv (sad I
know), the OGL API doesn't look too bad and OGL is probably a more portable
skill - there is even a version that runs on mobile phones!!!!

Thoughts?

Is OGL a nightmare to code when you get into it?

Thanks


Julian

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