Library for graphical visualization

[Jonas25]

There are a lot of libraries for graphical applications, unfortunately most of them go into game development, what I am not looking for at all. And most questions I found while researching discussed game development, what is not at all what I am looking for.

I work currently on a library for environment mapping and want to add the possibility to add a graphical representation of this, mainly for debugging purposes.

What is the best graphical library I could use for this? I am looking for something in the direction of processing, but for c++.

I found Openframeworks, but this is quite bulky and needs a certain file structure to begin with, so it can't be easily added to an existing software project.

[jumper007]

Hi Jonas,

I've faced the same issue last year. Had to find a Visualization library that was straightforward to use for a larger project at work. After a couple days of research, I've come across VTK (VisualizationToolKit). Personally, I've found it perfectly suitable for my data visualization project and have been using it for the past 6 months.

Hope this helps!

Raul

EDIT: VTK is quite bulky as well I'm afraid, and will require you to build your project using CMake. Nevertheless, it is the only tool I can recommend for such purposes, and I'm afraid that you can't really find something that wouldn't require you to change your project settings and adapt it to a different build environment.

[jonnin]

what exactly do you want to draw? For debugging, can you rig your code to dump a file that something like graphviz will render, for example? Or does it have to be drawn in the program itself?

You can also do a lot in a windows program with some simple code and some 2-d direct draw calls. I mean for debugging, all you probably need is text, boxes, and lines, right?