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VTK - The Visualization Toolkit

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

General information is available at the VTK Homepage.
Community discussion takes place on the VTK Discourse forum.
Commercial support and training are available from Kitware.
Doxygen-generated nightly reference documentation is available online.
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:

If you have a patch, please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document.
Otherwise, please join the VTK Discourse forum and ask about the expected and observed behaviors to determine if it is really a bug.
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.