[vtkusers] How to use the docs efficiently as a newbie to vtk?

[David Doria]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 9:46 PM,  <lynx.abraxas at freenet.de> wrote:
> On 18/12/09 22:55:02, Jérôme wrote:
>> David D. did a lot of adds on the wiki (examples), they are an huge amount
>> of tutorials, shared codes, presentations that will help you, for sure.
>> IMHO, VTK is one of the most documented open library that I am using.
>
> Thanks David D. and Jerome.
> The "List of all members" is a good advice. This shoul make it much easier for
> me now. I some how managed to over look  it  since  most  class  references  I
> looked  at  showed  already so many functions that I expected everything to be
> listed already...
>
> I didn't want to say that vtk is badly documented, not  at  all.  I  was  just
> wondering how other manage to get going so much quicker than me (although I've
> programmed for many years in lots of languages and learned  to  read  code  of
> others when I built my LFS).
> Jerome's   point  might  explain  this  a  bit  because  I  use  vtk  not  for
> visiualisation but more for analysis.
> So would You recommend using another library for such things? I  started  with
> the  capabilities  of blender. They were sufficient at that time and I already
> knew Blender. I found out about vtk and came to use it when I was looking  for
> a  countouring  program/function  that  takes  a  volume  picture as input and
> results in a mesh (suitable for blender). Now it turns  out  my  blender  code
> runs  correct  but  far too slow with the bigger dataset I have now. So here I
> am, trying to use vtk for that as well now. Am I wrong here?
> Is there a better library for these purposes? One that is  perhaps  easier  to
> use in that sense and perhaps even quicker than vtk?
>
> Thanks again,
> Lynx

There are certainly other packages you could try. A very computational
package is CGAL (http://www.cgal.org/). Meshlab
(http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/) is kind of like paraview, but much
less "polished" in my opinion. I recommend trying those in hopes that
you will see the "competition" and come back to VTK convinced that it
is what you should be using.

I also use VTK mostly for computation and only a bit for actual
visualization. But it is exactly this "all in one" idea that is very
appealing to me. VTK can do my file I/O, my computation, as well as my
visualization. Not to mention that Paraview is fantastic and "just
works" with everything I am already doing in VTK. The two together
would be very hard to beat in my opinion.

Thanks,

David