Introduction
VTK is an open-source software system for image processing, 3D graphics, volume rendering and visualization. VTK includes many advanced algorithms (e.g., surface reconstruction, implicit modeling, decimation) and rendering techniques (e.g., hardware-accelerated volume rendering, LOD control).
VTK is used by academicians for teaching and research; by government research institutions such as Los Alamos National Lab in the US or CINECA in Italy; and by many commercial firms who use VTK to build or extend products.
The origin of VTK is with the textbook "The Visualization Toolkit, an Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" originally published by Prentice Hall and now published by Kitware, Inc. (Third Edition ISBN 1-930934-07-6). VTK has grown (since its initial release in 1994) to a world-wide user base in the commercial, academic, and research communities.
Learning Resources
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General information is available at the VTK Homepage.
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Community discussion takes place on the VTK Discourse forum.
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Commercial support and training are available from Kitware.
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Doxygen-generated nightly reference documentation is available online.
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There is now a large collection of VTK Examples that showcase VTK features and provide a useful learning resource.
Reporting Bugs
If you have found a bug:
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If you have a patch, please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document.
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Otherwise, please join the VTK Discourse forum and ask about the expected and observed behaviors to determine if it is really a bug.
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Finally, if the issue is not resolved by the above steps, open an entry in the VTK Issue Tracker.
Requirements
In general VTK tries to be as portable as possible; the specific configurations below are known to work and tested.
VTK supports the following compilers:
- GCC 4.8 or newer
- Clang 3.3 or newer
- Apple Clang 5.0 (from Xcode 5.0) or newer
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 or newer
- Intel 14.0 or newer
VTK supports the following operating systems:
- Windows Vista or newer
- Mac OS X 10.7 or newer
- Linux (ex: Ubuntu 12.04 or newer, Debian 4 or newer)
Building
See build.md (in Documentation/dev/) for build instructions.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions to contribute.
License
VTK is distributed under the OSI-approved BSD 3-clause License. See Copyright.txt for details.