As of September 2008 the current version of VTK is VTK 5.2. If you would like to try installing this version of VTK from the source code, a good description of how to do this is given at http://idolinux.blogspot.com/2008/09/vtk-64-bit-on-red-hat-5-centos-5.html
If you are installing in 32 bit mode you can ignore lines about setting the lib64 paths.
You need to have the ccmake program on your system. If this is not part of a package on your system you need to first go though the cmake build process described at the URL given above. That requires that the ncurses library be installed.
Some fiddling of LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PYTHONPATH environment variables may be needed to get things up and running.
Hi Oleg I mentioned use of VTK for 3-D visualization in Wednesday's videocon. A concern of mine at that time was that I had not found a good example of VTK in use with real-time updates etc. Well, some scouring over the VTK mailing list produced a C++ example which it was easy to translate to python (see the attachment). So I think you should go ahead and install VTK (http://www.vtk.org/get-software.php). I installed VTK 4.4 LatestRelease. Note: There is a bug in the VTK python wrappers for Qt in this release: In VTK/Wrapping/Python/vtk/qt you should edit the python scripts QVTKRenderWidget.py and QVTKRenderWindowInteractor.py. Replace the lines: apply(QWidget.__init__, (self,parent,name) + args, kw) with apply(QWidget.__init__, (self,parent,name) + args) i.e. drop the passing of the 'kw' variable. (The VTK people are aware of this bug and have fixed it in the snapshot release.) The script VTK/Examples/GUI/Python/ImagePlaneWidget.py has the code for the demo I showed (or attempted to) on Wednesday. In order to run it you would need the VTKData-4.2 demo data set available as well from the VTK site. VTK uses something called cmake (http://www.cmake.org/HTML/Download.html) for its build (a very poor cousin to gnu autoconf). You will need to install cmake in order to build VTK. Cheers (and good luck) Tony ___________ Tony Willis National Research Council Tony.Willis@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca Box 248 (250)493-2277 Penticton, BC V2A 6J9 fax: 493-7767 Government of Canada Gouvernement du Canada