<div dir="ltr">Friends, <div><br></div><div>Some more good news on the rendering side of things. In the last few days, we have worked on porting two more volume mappers to OpenGL2 (FixedPoint and Bunyk) and this noon we merged that code into VTK master. This change should not affect the code that is using the OpenGL (and not OpenGL2) backend. We will keep an eye on the dashboards and fix any issue that we may find. Also, we have updated the vtkSmartVolumeMapper to deal with the OpenGL and OpenGL2 backend. </div><div><br></div><div>Please let us know if you have any questions or if you encounter any issues in the current master related to this change. </div><div><br></div><div>Thanks, </div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Aashish Chaudhary <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aashish.chaudhary@kitware.com" target="_blank">aashish.chaudhary@kitware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Friends, <div><br></div><div>As referred earlier, we are continuously working on improving the volume rendering. As part of next set of delivery, we are going to bring our first OpenGL2 volume mapper to the OpenGL2 backend. </div><div>We have a branch that will get merged today and<b> it should only affect the dashboards and code base switched to OpenGL2 backend</b>. We will continue to improve the integration and will use and improve the </div><div>existing OpenGL2 backend code as necessary. </div><div><br></div><div>If you have any questions of concerns or if you find in any ways its affecting your regular builds that uses OpenGL(default, and not OpenGL2) backend then let us know as soon as possible. </div><div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div><br></div></div><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Aashish Chaudhary <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aashish.chaudhary@kitware.com" target="_blank">aashish.chaudhary@kitware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">Friends,</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black"><br></span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">As reported back in July, we are in the process of a major overhaul of the rendering subsystem in VTK. The July article (<a href="http://www.kitware.com/source/home/post/144" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue">http://www.kitware.com/source/home/post/144</span></a>) focused primarily on our efforts to move to OpenGL 2.1+ to support faster polygonal rendering. The October Source will contain an article focused on our rewrite of the vtkGPURayCastMapper class to provide a faster, more portable and more easily extensible volume mapper for regular rectilinear grids. </span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">VTK has a long history of volume rendering, and unfortunately that history is evident in the large selection of classes available to render volumes. Each of these methods was state-of-the-art at the time, but given VTK’s 20+ year history many of these methods are now quite obsolete. One goal of this effort is to reduce the number of volume mappers to ideally just two - one that supports accelerated rendering on graphics hardware and another that works in parallel on the CPU. In addition, the vtkSmartVolumeMapper would help application developers by automatically choosing between these techniques based on system performance.</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"> </span></p></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">In this first phase, we have created a replacement for vtkGPURayCastMapper. Currently, this is available for testing from the VTK git repository (in master branch, disabled by default). General instructions on how to build VTK from the source is available at this URL: </span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"><a href="http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Git" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:blue">http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Git</span></a></span><u><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:rgb(17,85,204)">. </span></u><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">In order to build the new mapper, enable the Module_vtkRenderingVolumeOpenGLNew module in cmake (via -D<i>Module_vtkRenderingVolumeOpenGL=ON</i>), in ccmake or cmake-gui. Once built, it can be used via vtkSmartVolumeMapper or used directly. Once sufficient testing by the community has been performed, this class will replace the old vtkGPURayCastMapper. In addition, we are adding this new mapper to the OpenGL2 module. Availability of the new mapper with OpenGL2 module will improve the management of textures in the mapper and eventually benefitting both forms of rendering (geometry and volume) by sharing common code between them.</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div><img src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif"></div></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black"><br></span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">Please contact us if you have any questions or encounter any issues.</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black"><br></span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:'Droid Serif',serif;color:black">Thanks,</span></p></span></div><span><font color="#888888"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><font face="trebuchet ms, sans-serif"><i>| Aashish Chaudhary <br>| Technical Leader <br>| Kitware Inc. <br></i></font><div><i><font face="trebuchet ms, sans-serif">| </font><a href="http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html" target="_blank">http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html</a></i></div></div>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><font face="trebuchet ms, sans-serif"><i>| Aashish Chaudhary <br>| Technical Leader <br>| Kitware Inc. <br></i></font><div><i><font face="trebuchet ms, sans-serif">| </font><a href="http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html" target="_blank">http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html</a></i></div></div>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><font face="trebuchet ms, sans-serif"><i>| Aashish Chaudhary <br>| Technical Leader <br>| Kitware Inc. <br></i></font><div><i><font face="trebuchet ms, sans-serif">| </font><a href="http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html" target="_blank">http://www.kitware.com/company/team/chaudhary.html</a></i></div></div>
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