VTK/Building

Building VTK CVS on Win32

Does not require the use of a CVS client

Step 1

Download VTK vtkNightlyDoc.tag.gz and unpack the archive into C:\MyProjects\VTKCVS

This archive is generated every night from the CVS of VTK. It contains exactly what you would get if you were to use a cvs client to download VTK from the cvs server.

Step 2

Download CMake (CMake 2.4.4) from http://cmake.org/HTML/Download.html. Choose the windows installer (cmake-2.4.4-win32.exe) and install it.

Step 3

Create a folder C:\MyProjects\VTKCVSBin. This will store the compiled binaries

Step 4

Start CMake, provide the source codes and binaries paths to CMake. Then press Configure button to let CMake read the CMakeLists.txt from the source path and configure the variables. In your case you should have:

Where is the source code: C:\MyProjects\VTKCVS
Where to build the binaries: C:\MyProjects\VTKCVSBin

Once you hit 'Configure', make sure to turn on:

* BUILD_SHARED_LIBS

this causes the VTK dlls to be built. You should not change anything else.

Step 5

Open the VTK.sln (VTK.dsw for the old VS6) from C:\MyProjects\VTKCVSBin using VS .Net 2003 and build it. You can choose either to build in Release or Debug (prefer release since the code will be faster).

Step 6

Installation, the VTK dll will be in C:\MyProjects\VTKCVSBin\bin\release, therefore by default the system cannot find them. You have the choice in either copying the dll to c:\windows\system32 or change the environment variable PATH to include the path: C:\MyProjects\VTKCVSBin\bin\release

Be very careful if you have multiple VTK installed on your system that you are using the right one. It is strongly suggested that only one version of the VTK dll be on one system.

Step 7

When building your project if you don't use CMake, make sure that Additional Include Directories and Additional Library Directories (from within the Visual Studio interface) are pointing to the proper path of VTKCVS and not the old VTK 4.4 or VTK5

Links

• Installing VTK 4.1.x on a windows PC
• How to build VTK with Java support on Windows