[Installer] Automatic installer for the pre-compiled libraries of VTK-5.0.2 in MinGW, Windows XP

Compilation of VTK in MinGW is even harder. It is really troublesome to get the libraries bulit.

The automatic installer for the MinGW version of pre-compiled libraries of VTK-5.0.2 in MinGW on Windows XP is also available now.

The download link can be found here:
http://www.driveway.com/n6i5y6n8o1

The screenshot of the installer is here (with embeded license of VTK):



For path settings, please view the install guide.

[Installer] Automatic installer for the pre-compiled libraries of VTK-5.0.2 in Visual Studio 7.1 (2003), Windows XP

After reviewing the license in VTK, I figured out that it is possible (and legal) to redistribute pre-compiled libraries in VTK.

I know it is very troublesome to compile the libraries by users. So, I have packed up the automatic installer for the pre-compiled libraries of VTK.

Currently, it is only available for VTK-5.0.2 in Visual Studio 7.1 (2003), Windows XP (But, it should be compatitable with future versions of Visual Studio compilers). I will add more kinds of distributions on request.

The download link can be found here: http://www.driveway.com/r2c6e0s6v0

The screenshot of the installer is here (with embeded license of VTK):


After installing the libraries, you need to set up the search pathes (i.e. include path and libraries path) for the IDE (in this case, Visual Studio 7.1). Please see the previous "Build VTK in Visual Studio" guideline to learn how to set up the pathes (Actually, you are not needed to go into the detail. You can just view the bottom few figures in the install guide).

The un-installer is provided in the install directory you specified.

Build VTK from source using MinGW/MSys

Here is the reference document on how to build VTK from source in MinGW/MSys



The minimal project for MinGW/MSys can be found here:



Two files are potentially useful in the build process:

http://code.hkpeterpeter.googlepages.com/CMakeLists.txt

http://code.hkpeterpeter.googlepages.com/jconfig.h

(Note: Although not quite accurate, you can think MinGW is a thin abstraction layer which allows you to port softwares in Unix-like environment to Windows with the minimal changes of code. MSys provides a Unix-like shell environment, just like bash/csh).

[Announcement] Invitation of editor

Dear all,

I have not updated for nearly a year. My previous goal is to accompany the weakness of the VTK mailing list. The mailing list is good source of information, but unfortunately lacking organized structure. The example programs given in the VTK source distributions are also nice, but most of them are written in scripting language which may not be suitable for C++ developers. That is the reason why I would like to write up some illustrative examples with demo figures and source codes using C++ programming language (instead of scripting language such as TCL and Python).

Dues to some personal issues, I can't fit this goal yet. For example, I am not an expert in medical imaging, but I have been asking some examples in C++ related to this field.

So, I would like to invite some volunteers to design and write some tutorials with are in similar format. The invited editors have ability to post some new articles, or edit the previous articles.

The requirements for the content are
===========================
1. Programming language (Must be C++)
2. Preferred codebase (Pure VTK is preferable, adding other libraries are okay, but need to explain how to get them in the post)
3. Platform (May not need to in Windows, other platforms are okay)
4. Source codes (Must include the source code - zipped or in a single cpp file, you can upload them to some free web spaces - e.g. Google Page Creator)
5. How to compile and build
6. (Optional) With a single image/video clip to illustrate what it is (to save time of viewers...)

Some possible topics may be interesting
============================
1. A survey of how to use VTK with other GUI libraries (e.g. such as FLTK, Qt)
2. Many illustrative examples of how to use VTK in different fields (such as volume rendering, medical imaging....)
3. Some latest features in VTK (such as GPU acceleration using shaders)
4. Using VTK with ITK (how to bridge them)
5. More....

For volunteers who are interested, please feel free to contact me via hkpeterpeter@gmail.com. I can grant the editing permission of this blog for volunteers.

Peter