VTK Beginner Course

The beginner course offers a firsthand look at the Visualization Toolkit for users/developers coming from different backgrounds. The course is structured to introduce the students to VTK, teach the most fundamental concepts and set up a working environment and explore simple visualization pipelines.

Objectives

• Introduce the VTK data model
• Process and render data using visualization pipelines
• Explore interactive visualization with UI

Prerequisites

• Basic C++ programming knowledge
• Basic Python programming knowledge
• Basic understanding of data processing and visualization
• CMake knowledge a plus

Agenda

This course covers 8 hours of material, which can be divided into shorter sessions around your availability.

Our Recommendation: For onsite courses, we recommend either one 8-hour day of instruction (morning and afternoon sessions with a lunch break) or two 4-hour sessions on consecutive days. For an online course, we can accommodate a variety of schedules, including 2-hour sessions held on four consecutive days, or over the course of 2 or more weeks.

Introduction to VTK

• History
• Open Source License
• Cross-platform support
• Use-cases

Architecture

• Module system
• Data model
• Rendering model

Visualization pipeline

• Processing data
• Commonly used filters and their parameters
• Commonly used rendering classes and parameters

Setting up

• Download
• Build
• VTK Hello World

I/O

• Sources
• Reading and writing data

Interaction

• Interactor styles
• Event system
• Widgets
• Picking / Selection

VTK in other software