[vtkusers] Volume Rendering

[David E DeMarle]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 1:57 AM, Madhu Saravana Sibi Govindan
<ssshayagriva at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

Yes.

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

It requires OpenGL. Mesa is a software only implementation of OpenGL.
When you configure and compile VTK to use the Mesa it therefore does
not need a Graphics Card.

> 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 )

Hard to say. It estimate it would take longer than that to strip the
related volume rendering code _out_ of VTK. But it would not be hard
to use VTK to do volume rendering in a small application and then give
that to the students to parallelize. However, VTK has a steep learning
curve for most people so you and your students may have difficult
climbing to do.

>
> Your time and reply are much appreciated - in advance.
>
> Thanks,
> G.Sibi
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David E DeMarle
Kitware, Inc.
R&D Engineer
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