I would like to develop a small cross-platform for (structured) mesh generation software (similar to Gmesh) and possibly 3D pre/post processing (like Salome).
In order to make things easier I'd like to use already made libraries, to better focus on the development of what I need.
I need
1. geometrical modelling capabilities
2. GUI
3. 3D visualization.
I have been looking around but the whole workflow results a bit blurry.
I think pyGTK and GLADE are good choices for me ( because of the community and the very open license with respect to pyQt).
The modelling part could be handled by Open Cascade ( preferably pythonOCC) but for the visulization in a pyGTK widget I don't know what to do.
I was thinking to use openGL (PyGtkGLExt) but I understood that OpenGL is too low-level.
FreeCAD (http://goo.gl/V4FCW) uses Coin3D (I could use pyvy maybe) for this reason but a software like Gmesh uses directly OpenGL.
On top of that I saw that for scientific visualization, VTK would be probably better, but I don't understand whether it is based on OpenGL or not. In my opinion OpenGL is nice because it is supported by graphic card drivers making the whole software faster.
I should be able to render geometries built by pythonOCC into a pyGTK widget but what kind of libraries would be better to use? OpenGL alone (maybe to complex to program?)
Coin3D (or similar) to speed up the use of OpenGL?
VTK alone? VTK in combination with OpenGL?
Other combination and/or libraries?
Have you experience in this kind of software?
Do you have suggestion about it? Do you know tutorials where the combined used of these libraries is explained?