VTK 5.6 Release Planning

Planned Schedule

• Preparation email: February 4th, 2010
  • On the developers' mailing list
• Create VTK-5-6 branch: March 26th, 2010
• Release VTK 5.6.0: TBD

What's New in VTK 5.6?

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.

API Changes

• 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.

OpenGL requirements

Same as VTK 5.2: See this section in the Frequently asked questions (FAQ)