[vtkusers] Volume Rendering

[Madhu Saravana Sibi Govindan]

Dear All,

My name is Sibi Govindan and I'm a Phd student at the University of
Texas at Austin. For a parallel systems course at UT, we are trying to
design a programming assignment with Volume Rendering. In this
assignment, the task of the students will be to parallelize volume
rendering code.  Specifically, they'll be using the ray tracing
algorithms presented in Marc Levoy's classic paper.

For this assignment, we are in need of a simple, sequential
implementation of volume rendering (in c or c++), which I can use as a
starting point for creating the assignment framework. The idea is that
I'll strip off the rendering code from the sequential implementation
and provide the framework to students, who will parallelize the
algorithm using pthreads or MPI.

I was searching for various implementations of Volume Rendering, and I
hit upon VTK. I would be very thankful if you could answer these
questions for me:

1) We need to run this framework on the Linux/Unit platform. Skimming
through the VTK pages, it looks like VTK should build and run on
Linux. Is this right?

2) Does VTK need any graphics card support via OpenGL? Or is it purely
based on C++ and other languages/libraries?

3) Would it be easy for me to string off the rendering code from VTK
and provide VTK as a framework to the students? (easy == complete
within 5 or 6 days )

Your time and reply are much appreciated - in advance.

Thanks,
G.Sibi