VTK 5.6 Release Planning

Planned Schedule

New features in VTK since the 5.4 release include:

Improved support for line charts, bar charts etc - no Qt dependence.
New text analysis module.
Parallel render passes
Partial support for 3DConnexion devices
Classes moved from vtkEdge to VTK, including the vtkGPUVolumeRayCastMapper & associated classes.
More robust EnSight reader.
Addition of Tecplot reader.
Accurate anti-jagginess streamline integrator
Incremental / dynamic octree-based point locator for fast point location and insertion of non-uniformly distributed points (3 times faster than the previous version).
Integration of robust cell location to vector evaluation on complex grids.
High-performance table-based clipper for various kinds of grids (one to two orders of magnitude faster than the previous version).
Addition of GPU-based real time Line Integral Convolution (LIC) with enhanced image contrast and LIC+geometry compositing for dense vector field / flow visualization.
2D rendering API and canvas/scene with interaction support.
New data structures for points, vectors, colors, etc.
Compiler support for Visual Studio 10 - Fixes have been made so that VTK can now be compiled with Visual Studio 10. Note that CMake 2.8.0 or greater is required.
270 new C++ classes.
120 new C++ tests running on most dashboards
17 new C++ examples that demonstrate how to use VTK effectively.

the use of vtkMath::Random(), vtkMath::RandomSeed(), vtkMath::GetSeed(), vtkMath::Gaussian() is deprecated (there are error-prone and not deterministic (which is important for reproducibility of regression testing) as they use global static information. Instead, you should create an object of class vtkMinimalStandardRandomSequence to get a sequence of pseudo-random number following a uniform distribution. You should create an object of class vtkBoxMuellerRandomSequence to get a sequence of pseudo-random number following a Gaussian distribution.