Good book? || vtk versus opengl?

OpenGL
1

Hello…
I want to develop a real-time application using mostly VTK (but I hear OpenGL would probably be more suited for something that is real-time)…

I am probably going to have to use Linux, which I have very basic knowledge of in terms of commands etc…

So can anyone suggest a good book to using OpenGL in Linux which gives detailed info on how to install and use opengl on linux etc… and that is also oriented towards real-time and object oriented programming…?

also, anyone know anything about the performance of openGL versus VTK?

thanks, any help is appreciated…!

2

I dont know what VTK is but to my knowledge is OpenGL the only way to get hardware acceleration. OpenGL is a low level library and not object oriented. The use is pretty much the same for all X systems so check out SGIs books
http://www.parallab.uib.no/SGI_bookshelves/SGI_Developer/books/OpenGLonSGI/sgi_html/index.html

The red book about OpenGL http://www.parallab.uib.no/SGI_bookshelves/SGI_Developer/books/OpenGL_PG/sgi_html/index.html

I suspect that you miss how complex and difficult this is.

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In debian libvtk4 depends on xlibmesa3-gl or similar, so it’s not really a ‘vs’ more than a “use pure GL or with a toolkit”.

4

Unless you have a very limited knowledge of 3D programming and are wishing to do scientific viz, you should steer clear of vtk. vtk is written at a higher level than openGL and is decent for volume rendering, but unless you know a specific reason why you would benefit from vtk, then don’t bother with it.

The best way to learn openGL on Linux is to get the red book and then buy some sort of generic linux howto book seperately. If you know openGL then you know openGl for linux.

Asking questions in forums and using search engines is the best way to get your environment setup.

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