vtk-devel (tcl) and interaction on snow leopard

[saml@…]

Trying to troubleshoot a faculty members vtk code hanging after render on snow leopard, I tried the tcl sphere code here:

​http://www.vtk.org/VTK/help/examplecode.html

It renders the sphere fine, and then the mac beachball shows up, hanging until ctrl-c is hit in the terminal. To verify this code works, I copied it to my ubuntu vm and ran it there, and it's proper behavior is to render it, and then the user can rotate it by clicking and dragging.

The faculty members code was some specialized astronomy simulation code, and had the same results, it rendered the image, but then hanged.

Thanks for looking in to this

[dweber@…]

I'm being conservative in working on Leopard for some time, hoping that many library issues will be resolved by others for Snow Leopard sometime in the next 6-18 months. Hence, I don't have a test system for SL.

IMHO, if the libraries compile and install properly with MacPorts, then the port has done it's job. So, this problem may be an upstream issue to be addressed with Kitware/vtk developers. That is, there may be elements of the source code to be modified for working with SL. I have limited experience playing around with the render code for Cocoa in the vtk source distribution. In the MacPort, there are no custom modifications to the source code (none that I'm aware of). Check the vtk user mailing lists to see if there are any posts about similar behavior.

Please get back to me if this is really a specific problem with the MacPort distribution (i.e., compile and install process).

Take care, Darren

[saml@…]

Did a test in the Leopard Ugrad lab, running the same software, and it doesn't do the spinning ball like it's hanging, but it also doesn't rotate when you click and drag, so other than the spinning ball, appears the issue is in Leopard as well. I also looked into filing a bug upstream for vtk and all I can find is commercial support contracts on the kitware website. Does vtk have a bug tracker, or at least an e-mail address I can e-mail to file a bug?

Sam

Replying to dweber@…:

I'm being conservative in working on Leopard for some time, hoping that many library issues will be resolved by others for Snow Leopard sometime in the next 6-18 months. Hence, I don't have a test system for SL.

IMHO, if the libraries compile and install properly with MacPorts, then the port has done it's job. So, this problem may be an upstream issue to be addressed with Kitware/vtk developers. That is, there may be elements of the source code to be modified for working with SL. I have limited experience playing around with the render code for Cocoa in the vtk source distribution. In the MacPort, there are no custom modifications to the source code (none that I'm aware of). Check the vtk user mailing lists to see if there are any posts about similar behavior.

Please get back to me if this is really a specific problem with the MacPort distribution (i.e., compile and install process).

Take care, Darren

[dweber@…]

In my vtk-devel installation, with +examples (and the kitchen sink), there is an example at

/opt/local/share/vtk/examples/GUI/Tcl/SphereWidget.tcl

Perhaps you can try this?

$ tclsh
% source /opt/local/share/vtk/examples/GUI/Tcl/SphereWidget.tcl

This fails to run for me because there is a faulty mysql5 dependency in the dylib links, which was upgraded under-the-hood from v15 to v16, i.e.

/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/libmysqlclient.16.dylib

In the Portfile, there is a library dependency on mysql5 for the +mysql variant, i.e.

variant mysql5 description "build the MySQL driver for vtkSQLDatabase" {
    depends_lib-append \
        path:bin/mysql_config5:mysql5 \
        ...

However, when mysql5 was upgraded (and I usually do port upgrade -uR mysql5), it did not rebuild the vtk-devel port. Oh well.

I hope this helps, Darren

[jdv85 (Jonas Due Vesterheden)]

I had the exact same problem with the example code. Turns out that the vtkRenderWindowInteractor needs to be started and initialized:

iren Initialize
iren Start

When I add those two lines add the end of the example everything works fine.

[saml@…]

This last suggestion adding iren Start fixes my problem. Thankyou.

Sam