I’ll be completely honest… I’m lost and I need your help. I try to utilize VTK in my upcoming C# project and so far I was unable to properly set up my project.
So, I have a VTK build and everything set up on my machine… What’s next?
I read a lot of forum posts and google searches and most of them recommended ActiviViz which if I’m not mistaken is in two forms: Paid and open-source. Open-source one is 10+ years old (according to Nuget.org) so my question is… is it still relevant?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to avoid paying for supported ActiViz version. My company simply wants to explore all possibilities before diving into purchasing licences.
Can I use VTK build without using ActiViz? How?
If you have any meaningful C# project example, I would appreciate it very much :))
I confirm Activiz is the best way to get access to the VTK public API from a C# project.
The open-source version is based on VTK 5.8 and is not maintained anymore. The paid version however is based on the latest VTK version and is still developed actively.
The best is probably to give a try to the paid version by requesting a trial version on the Activiz website. Feel free to contact me if you have any issues trying it.
Activiz extensively uses the PInvoke C# technology to call the unmanaged VTK code. It also takes care of managing the VTK objects lifetime to make VTK smart pointers work with the C# garbage collector. In theory you could write similar code to expose your VTK C++ build in your C# project, but that would require a lot of effort.