[vtkusers] New user needs advice

[Noah]

Hello all,

Should I learn VTK for what I'm trying to do?

I am new to VTK and programming in general.  I want to measure the length and 
width of fixed, tube-shaped cells which I have imaged on both a confocal 
microscope and a DIC microscope.  

Using ImageJ, I can create a 3D visualization of the cells with my data, but I 
don't know how to measure/manipulate them in 3D.  

I learned about VTK through the ImageJ plugins site:

http://ij-plugins.sourceforge.net/index.html

which includes plugins to link VTK to ImageJ.  I am using a Mac G4 running OSX 
10.4.  

I have successfully compiled VTK from the source and can run TimeRenderer 
and TimeRenderer2 using Mr. Norton's excellent Tutorial at:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/06/28/
data_visualization.html

He sets it up with Tcl/Tk, but for VTK to work with ImageJ, it needs to be built 
with Java bindings, which I don't quite know how to do.

Should I learn Tcl/Tk?  Python?  Should I buy the VTK user's guide?

Any advice will be appreciated!

Thank you,
Noah