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

[Mike Jackson]

Google has been the best help for me so far. If you google for
"normals VTK polydata" you will probably find others asking the same
types of questions. You can then look at how they were answered.

   Grep works also if you access to it. Spotlight on OS X. If you are
using an IDE with a good code indexer,  you can start writing your
code and then ask for auto-completion and have the list of methods pop
up that are available. You can then start scanning through that list
to try and figure out what you might try.

 Just my 2 cents
_________________________________________________________
Mike Jackson                  mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
BlueQuartz Software                    www.bluequartz.net
Principal Software Engineer                  Dayton, Ohio



On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:14 PM, David Doria <daviddoria+vtk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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