Installing VTK

VTK (Visualisation ToolKit) is a C++ class library that MOOSE needs to use modules of Image Processing. In Redback, we are using some of these functions to create meshes from CT-scan Images.

VTK will be installed when compiling Libmesh with the right options.

Installation Commands

The official way of installing VTK is as follow:

cd ~/projects/moose/scripts
./update_and_rebuild_libmesh.sh --with-vtk-include=$VTKINCLUDE_DIR --with-vtk-lib=$VTKLIB_DIR

This is described in http://mooseframework.org/wiki/PhysicsModules/PhaseField/ImageReader/

Manual Installation

instead of using variables that are not always pointing to the right paths, you need to find the location of the include and the lib folder of VTK. The paths should look like this: --with-vtk-include=/opt/moose/vtk-6.3/clang-opt/include/vtk-6.3 --with-vtk-lib=/opt/moose/vtk-6.3/clang-opt/lib

The paths are changing depending on your OS or your version of MOOSE. To find them, try to open these folders and look where .h (for include) or .dylib (for lib) are located.

Then you run the same scripts with the absolute paths instead of the variables. It should look like this: cd ~/projects/moose/scripts ./update_and_rebuild_libmesh.sh --with-vtk-include=/opt/moose/vtk-6.3/clang-opt/include/vtk-6.3 --with-vtk-lib=/opt/moose/vtk-6.3/clang-opt/lib