Avogadro and VTK

Development
1

Hi,

I am finally beginning to join together two of the projects I spend
most of my time on! I have uploaded an Avogadro VTK extension to
Github.

This is an early prototype, and I will be adding more in terms of
integration and user interface. What it shows is an extension that
takes the first cube from an Avogadro molecule, and moves it into a
VTK data type, and then uses the GPU accelerated volume rendering
(falling back to CPU when necessary) to show the cube data (MO,
electron density etc). This is currently a purely VTK based render
window, and I am hoping to add a reasonable way to render more in this
window/integrate it with Avogadro more.

You will need a recent version of VTK (preferably from a recent Git
master build) to use the latest volume rendering code. This will
shortly become VTK 5.8.0. I will blog about this in the not too
distant future, with some screenshots. It looks very nice, and only
took an afternoon to put together. The integration will likely take
longer, but I couldn’t wait much longer to talk about it!

Thanks,

Marcus

Marcus D. Hanwell, Ph.D.
R&D Engineer, Kitware Inc.
(518) 881-4937

2

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Marcus D. Hanwell
mhanwell@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

I am finally beginning to join together two of the projects I spend
most of my time on! I have uploaded an Avogadro VTK extension to
Github.

GitHub - cryos/AvogadroVTK: Avogadro VTK extension, primarily using the volume rendering from VTK to look at electronic structure

A few more details in a blog post along with a screenshot for those of
you that would rather just see what it looks like right now. On my
nVidia card even a very fine grid using a Co terpyridine complex (~60
atoms) can be rendered and interacted with comfortably. The screenshot
shows benzene.

http://blog.cryos.net/archives/247-Volume-Rendering-in-Avogadro.html

I am hoping to spend some time with one of the main developers of our
volume rendering code to tweak the parameters and get the most out of
it.

Marcus