Couple OpenSees with VTK?

[rjaeger]

Frank,

have you considered using the Visualization Tool Kit for OpenSees graphics?

http://www.vtk.org/

[silvia]

i looked it up...
the program is free, sure.
if you want to learn to use it, you have to yield a lot of legal tender!

[rjaeger]

i looked it up...
the program is free, sure.
if you want to learn to use it, you have to yield a lot of legal tender!

You're right Silvia - they don't give the information away for free. Luckily the UC system has great libraries. It definitely has potential since it works on all major platforms and it's also object oriented.

Do you know of any other graphics toolkits that would be better suited for OpenSees? I've looked at FLTK, wxWidgets, GLUI, etc. which are all nice but VTK was built with scientific applications in mind (meaning less programming for us!).

[silvia]

i haven't done much homework, thank you for the resources.
i am using straight Tk on my stuff, but i'm no fancy programmer!

[carlos]

Hi,

I would recommend you to have a look to OpenCascade:
www.opencascade.org

I think it is quite similar to VTK, it is free (even for commercial uses) and it also supports TCL. Of course there are also some "minor problems" as there is not any official support.

There is another related code, Salome, focused on scientific applications (including meshing) although in this case Windows it is not supported.

Regards,

[aneeman]

I've gotten the two libraries to talk to each other in the past; you can link them.

The hard part looks like:

1. getting the data into a form that VTK is happy with; they have some nested (inheritance-wise) classes for this.

2. Getting a TK user interface that talks to both opensees and VTK.

I may be working on it in the fall; I want to do some volume rendering of scalar data.

cheers,

alisa