vtkr

The goal of vtkr is to read data from files in Visualization Toolkit format.

Currently very much in-development, but in time we can read in these models as rgl mesh forms.

The format is describe at these sites:

• https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/vtk/vtk.html (has examples in ASCII)
• https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/VTKFileFormats/
• https://vtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/file-formats.pdf

Other VTK readers for R

I don’t know many VTK readers that’s of use to R. If you do please let me know!

One is by Chris Black:

• https://gitlab.com/LynchLab/simrootR/blob/vtu_reader/R/vtu.R

Should also check this out: https://github.com/Chrismarsh/mesher

TODO

• DONE Basic example read
• Support the structured points in ASCII form
• Support the triangles in BINARY form
• Get out the triangle CELLS attributes
• Generalize the functions to read header, points-only, detect format, etc.
• Support more formats!

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
# devtools::install_github("hypertidy/vtkr")
install.packages("vtkr", repos = c('https://hypertidy.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Example

This is a basic example to read an in-built VTK file.

library(vtkr)
f <- system.file("extdata/STRUCTURED_GRID/volcano_points.vtk", package = "vtkr", mustWork = TRUE)
xyz <- read_vtk_points(f)
str(xyz)
#>  num [1:5307, 1:3] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...

Currently, we can only read

• STRUCTURED_GRID POINTS (BINARY format) - we get a matrix of 3D coordinates
• UNSTRUCTURED_GRID POINTS triangles CELLS (ASCII format) - we get a list with 3D coordinates and triangle indices

No CELL attributes are yet read.

Please get in touch! I’m especially keen if you have example files that aren’t supported yet.

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Please note that the ‘vtkr’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.