License
- OSI Approved :: BSD License
Programming Language
- Python
- C++
Intended Audience
- Developers
- Education
- Healthcare Industry
- Science/Research
Topic
- Multimedia :: Graphics
- Multimedia :: Graphics :: 3D Modeling
- Multimedia :: Graphics :: 3D Rendering
- Scientific/Engineering
- Scientific/Engineering :: Chemistry
- Scientific/Engineering :: Information Analysis
- Scientific/Engineering :: Medical Science Apps.
- Scientific/Engineering :: Physics
- Scientific/Engineering :: Visualization
- Software Development :: Libraries
Operating System
- Microsoft :: Windows
- POSIX
- Unix
- MacOS
Introduction
VTK is an open-source software system for image processing, 3D graphics, volume rendering and visualization. VTK includes many advanced algorithms (e.g., surface reconstruction, implicit modeling, decimation) and rendering techniques (e.g., hardware-accelerated volume rendering, LOD control).
VTK is used by academicians for teaching and research; by government research institutions such as Los Alamos National Lab in the US or CINECA in Italy; and by many commercial firms who use VTK to build or extend products.
The origin of VTK is with the textbook "The Visualization Toolkit, an Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" originally published by Prentice Hall and now published by Kitware, Inc. (Third Edition ISBN 1-930934-07-6). VTK has grown (since its initial release in 1994) to a world-wide user base in the commercial, academic, and research communities.
Learning Resources
-
General information is available at the VTK Homepage.
-
Community discussion takes place on the VTK Discourse forum.
-
Commercial support and training are available from Kitware.
-
Doxygen-generated nightly reference documentation is available online.
-
There is now a large collection of VTK Examples that showcase VTK features and provide a useful learning resource.
Reporting Bugs
If you have found a bug:
-
If you have a patch, please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document.
-
Otherwise, please join the VTK Discourse forum and ask about the expected and observed behaviors to determine if it is really a bug.
-
Finally, if the issue is not resolved by the above steps, open an entry in the VTK Issue Tracker.
Requirements
In general VTK tries to be as portable as possible; the specific configurations below are known to work and tested.
VTK supports the following compilers:
- GCC 4.8 or newer
- Clang 3.3 or newer
- Apple Clang 5.0 (from Xcode 5.0) or newer
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 or newer
- Intel 14.0 or newer
VTK supports the following operating systems:
- Windows Vista or newer
- Mac OS X 10.7 or newer
- Linux (ex: Ubuntu 12.04 or newer, Debian 4 or newer)
Building
See build.md (in Documentation/dev/) for build instructions.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions to contribute.
License
VTK is distributed under the OSI-approved BSD 3-clause License. See Copyright.txt for details.
Wheel compatibility matrix
| Platform | CPython 3.8 | CPython 3.9 | CPython 3.10 | CPython 3.11 | CPython 3.12 | CPython 3.13 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| macosx_10_10_x86_64 | ||||||
| macosx_11_0_arm64 | ||||||
| manylinux2014_x86_64 | ||||||
| manylinux_2_17_x86_64 | ||||||
| win_amd64 |
