[vtkusers] VTK in a MultiTouch Environment

[David Gobbi]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Christopher Denter
<dennda at the-space-station.com> wrote:

> Hello again!
>
> After my last mail to this list we have been able to make some progress.
> We still aren't able to render directly into a FBO and it still does not
> work on OSX or Windows (not confirmed, that is).

What is exactly is your "FBO"?  It it a PyMT object?  Any information
that you have about its internals would help the discussion.

> However, we found a workaround that might just work for the moment. I would
> love to hear your thoughts.
>
> We did this by first making VTK render in its own window, then we grabbed
> that window's colorbuffer as a texture and applied it to a rectangle in the
> real multitouch application.

There must be a better way.

> How to make it useful in Python?

The SetWindowInfo() method just converts a string into an address and
passes it to SetWindowId().  So for SetRootWindow(), you would need to
add a method called SetRootWindowInfo() to vtkCarbonRenderWindow that
takes a char *, converts the string to an address, and passes it to
SetRootWindow().  It would be an almost exact copy of the
SetWindowInfo() method.

> Thank you for your time and patience. Your expertise is really appreciated.
>
> I would love to hear your opinion on this,

If it was possible to do the VTK-PyMT connection through pure python,
I'm sure that you would have been able to do it by now.  But now it
looks like you'll need to do something at the C level.  If you let us
know exactly what an FBO is (internally) and how PyMT uses it, then we
might be able to help.

   David