VTK and Remote Desktop

Question

I'm using the Kitware VTK library to display 2D images. I've recently begun work using the vtkWindowToImageFilter to output images in various formats. Everything was looking great until I worked at home today and I began to realize that VTK rendering doesn't seem to work when you are running software on your work machine through Remote Desktop.

When I output an image while NOT running in Remote Desktop, the image that gets output only consists of the VTK window. But when I run this same process while using Remote Desktop, the output image comes out in the correct size, but does just a normal screenshot basically, and other UI elements outside of the VTK window are showing up.

Question:

What is it about Remote Desktop and VTK that causes the differences I'm seeing? Is there anything that can be done to support outputting images from VTK windows while using Remote Desktop?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

From the VTK mailing list, I received the following response:

Remote desktop swap the video card driver hence the issue you are seeing. But if you use VNC instead, you should be good.

Hope this helps someone make the decision I had to make: whether or not to go forward with development on this feature knowing that if used remotely, the results would be unusable. I decided to go ahead with development with the assumption that our users who are in the phase of their workflow where this feature will be used are normally going to be in the office sitting in front of their work machines.