95469-3 All you need to build state-of-the-art 3D visualization applications! From weather maps to MRIs, from marketing to finance, 3D visualization technology is revolutionizing the way information is delivered. And the revolution has just begun. Breakthrough tools like the Visualization Toolkit (vtk) Release 2.0 make visualization more practical and powerful than ever. This book delivers all you need to start building your own visualization applications: A complete introduction to visualization architectures and image processing algorithms-including essential algorithms for contouring, surface smoothing, cutting, slicing, decimation, and Delaunay triangulation: *An extensive collection of real-world case studies. *A working architecture and software design techniques for applying visualization to business and technical problems. *The complete vtk Release 2.0 software tools-complete C++ class libraries and source code for visualization, plus Tcl-based prototyping libraries and Java bindings...all the software you need for Win95/NT, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital UNIX, and IBM AIX! Learn how to leverage the power of vtk 2.0 to: *Build Web-based 3D visualization applications that take advantage of VRML, Java and Java3D. *Use volume rendering, which allows you to "see into" 3D datasets. *Use vtk's new 2D imaging pipeline to manipulate, display and combine 2D images into 3D datasets for further processing-and much more. Advanced 3D visualization is now practical in an unprecedented range of applications. If you're a C++, Java or Tcl/Tk programmer, you need to understand these tools and technologies. Now's the time - and there's no better place to start than The Visualization Toolkit.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
The aim of this text is to strike a balance between practice and theory. The book goes beyond description and focuses on applicaton of visualization to real-world problems.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
Preface
Visualization is a great field to work in these days. Advances in computer hardware and software have brought this technology into the reach of nearly every computer system. Even the ubiquitous personal computer now offers specialized 3D graphics hardware. And with the release of Windows95 and OpenGL, there is an API for 3D graphics as well.
We view visualization and visual computing as nothing less than a new form of communication. All of us have long known the power of images to convey information, ideas, and feelings. Recent trends have brought us 2D images and graphics as evidenced by the variety of graphical user interfaces and business plotting software. But 3D images have been used sparingly, and often by specialists using specialized systems. Now this is changing. We believe we are entering a new era where 3D images, visualizations, and animations will begin to extend, and in some cases, replace the current communication paradigm based on words, mathematical symbols, and 2D images. Our hope is that along the way the human imagination will be freed like never before.
This text and companion software offers one view of visualization. The field is broad, including elements of computer graphics, imaging, computer science, computational geometry, numerical analysis, statistical methods, data analysis, and studies in human perception. We certainly do not pretend to cover the field in its entirety. However, we feel that this text does offer you a great opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of visualization. Not only can you learn from the written word and companion images, but the included software will allow you to practice visualization. You can start by using the sample data we have provided here, and then move on to your own data and applications. We believe that you will soon appreciate visualization as much as we do.
In this, the second edition of Visualization Toolkit and vtk version 2.0, we have added several new features since the first edition. Volume rendering is now fully supported, including the ability to combine opaque surface graphics with volumes. We have added an extensive image processing pipeline that integrates conventional 3D visualization and graphics with imaging. Besides several new filters such as clipping, smoothing, 2D/3D Delaunay triangulation, and a new decimation algorithm, we have added several readers and writers, and better support net-based tools such as Java and VRML. Finally, our PC support has greatly improved, including a nice tool for managing the compile process.
The additions of these features necessitated the addition of three special contributors to the text: Lisa Sobierajski Avila, Rick Avila, and C. Charles Law. Rick and Lisa worked hard to create an object-oriented design for volume rendering, and to insure that the design and software is fully compatible with the surface-based rendering system. Charles is the principle architect and implementor for the imaging pipeline. We are proud of the streaming and caching capability of the architecture: It allows us to handle large data sets despite limited memory resources.
Especially satisfying has been the response from users of the text and software. Not only have we received a warm welcome from these wonderful people, but many of them have contributed code, bug fixes, data, and ideas that greatly improved the system. In fact, it would be best to categorize these people as co-developers rather than users of the system. We would like to encourage anyone else who is interested in sharing their ideas, code, or data to contact the vtk user community, or one of the authors. We would very much welcome any contributions you have to make.
Contact us at kitware.
Visualization is a great field to work in these days. Advances in computer hardware and software have brought this technology into the reach of nearly every computer system. Even the ubiquitous personal computer now offers specialized 3D graphics hardware. And with the release of Windows95 and OpenGL, there is an API for 3D graphics as well.
We view visualization and visual computing as nothing less than a new form of communication. All of us have long known the power of images to convey information, ideas, and feelings. Recent trends have brought us 2D images and graphics as evidenced by the variety of graphical user interfaces and business plotting software. But 3D images have been used sparingly, and often by specialists using specialized systems. Now this is changing. We believe we are entering a new era where 3D images, visualizations, and animations will begin to extend, and in some cases, replace the current communication paradigm based on words, mathematical symbols, and 2D images. Our hope is that along the way the human imagination will be freed like never before.
This text and companion software offers one view of visualization. The field is broad, including elements of computer graphics, imaging, computer science, computational geometry, numerical analysis, statistical methods, data analysis, and studies in human perception. We certainly do not pretend to cover the field in its entirety. However, we feel that this text does offer you a great opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of visualization. Not only can you learn from the written word and companion images, but the included software will allow you to practice visualization. You can start by using the sample data we have provided here, and then move on to your own data and applications. We believe that you will soon appreciate visualization as much as we do.
In this, the second edition of Visualization Toolkit and vtk version 2.0, we have added several new features since the first edition. Volume rendering is now fully supported, including the ability to combine opaque surface graphics with volumes. We have added an extensive image processing pipeline that integrates conventional 3D visualization and graphics with imaging. Besides several new filters such as clipping, smoothing, 2D/3D Delaunay triangulation, and a new decimation algorithm, we have added several readers and writers, and better support net-based tools such as Java and VRML. Finally, our PC support has greatly improved, including a nice tool for managing the compile process.
The additions of these features necessitated the addition of three special contributors to the text: Lisa Sobierajski Avila, Rick Avila, and C. Charles Law. Rick and Lisa worked hard to create an object-oriented design for volume rendering, and to insure that the design and software is fully compatible with the surface-based rendering system. Charles is the principle architect and implementor for the imaging pipeline. We are proud of the streaming and caching capability of the architecture: It allows us to handle large data sets despite limited memory resources.
Especially satisfying has been the response from users of the text and software. Not only have we received a warm welcome from these wonderful people, but many of them have contributed code, bug fixes, data, and ideas that greatly improved the system. In fact, it would be best to categorize these people as co-developers rather than users of the system. We would like to encourage anyone else who is interested in sharing their ideas, code, or data to contact the vtk user community, or one of the authors. We would very much welcome any contributions you have to make.
Contact us at kitware.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book on scientific visualization,
By
This review is from: The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3-D Graphics (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)
This book is poorly titled, because it discusses the algorithms and techniques of visualization much more than the use of the Visualization Toolkit software. However, it is a good introduction to scientific visualization, and the free software included on the CD is an extremely powerful and useful tool. However, if you only wish to learn to use the software, The Visualization Toolkit User's Guide would be much more appropriate for you.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Next to useless if you actually want to learn to use VTK,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3-D Graphics (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)
If you're looking for a book to learn to use VTK, this is practically useless. The language is explained only incidentally, and in very little detail. the book mostly concentrates on computer graphics theory (which is done much better in other books) and visualisation, which it treats fairly well.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for understanding visualization algorithms,
By Lisa S. Avila (Clifton Park, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3-D Graphics (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)
This book is great for gaining an in-depth understanding of the underlying visualization algorithms used in the Visualization Toolkit. If you would like understand how to use the VTK software, you should purchase The Visualization Toolkit User's Guide. This companion book is updated for each major release of VTK, and contains many detailed examples.
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