[Paraview-developers] ParaView 3.8.0 Available for download

[Dave Partyka]

Hello All,

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory are
proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.8.0. The binaries and sources
are available for download from the ParaView website (
http://www.paraview.org/paraview/resources/software.html). This release
includes several performance improvements, bug fixes for users, and plenty
of new features for plugin and application developers. We have made it
easier to locate cells/points in your dataset using queries. Search the
ParaView Wiki for "Find Data using Queries" for more information.

The plugin loading and management dialog was redesigned to make it easier to
load plugins. It's now possible to configure plugins to be auto-loaded every
time ParaView starts. We've added support for plotting over curves and
intersection lines using the filters "Plot On Sorted Lines" and "Plot On
Intersection Curves".

A couple of GPU-based rendering/visualization techniques have been
incorporated along with GPU-based volume rendering support for 3D image
volumes, which is accessible through the "Volume Mapper" option on the
Display tab. Support for Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is available as a
plugin; this support can be used for visualizing vector fields over
arbitrary surfaces.

ParaView now includes (in source form only) an interface to the University
of Utah's Manta interactive software ray tracing engine. The Manta plugin
provides a new 3D View type which uses Manta instead of OpenGL for
rendering. The plugin is primarily being developed for visualization of
large datasets on parallel machines. In single processor configuration it
has the benefit of allowing realistic rendering effects such as shadows,
translucency and reflection.

In terms of performance improvements, we've greatly improved the first
render time for datasets with large numbers of blocks. Raw image reading for
parallel file systems underwent a major overhaul making it fast and
efficient. Options were added to the Settings dialog to fine tune image
compression, improving interactivity when remote rendering over connections
with varying bandwidths.

After the introducing Python tracing in the previous release, we have
expanded the purview of tracing to include selections, lookup tables, and
implicit functions.

For climate simulation folks, this release includes support for NetCDF with
CF (Climate and Forecast) conventions. For cosmology researchers, the Cosmo
plugin has been substantially revised. The major improvement is that the
plugin now works in a data parallel fashion, so that it can be used with
higher resolution simulation results. We have reintroduced basic support for
CAVE rendering which was lost since the major overhaul for ParaView 3.0.

Several new readers have been contributed: WindBlade a reader for wind
turbine and fire simulation data, VPIC a reader for particle and cell
physics simulation data, and netcdf POP a reader for POP ocean simulation
data in a netcdf container format.

AdaptiveParaView, a new experimental application developed using the
ParaView application framework is also now available in source format. Like
StreamingParaView, AdaptiveParaView processes structured datasets in a
piecewise fashion, omitting pieces which are unimportant, in order to make
it possible to visualize datasets which do not otherwise fit in RAM.
AdaptiveParaView differs from prior work in that it renders pieces in a
multi-resolution manner, initially producing low-resolution images and then
progressively filling in greater detail within the viewing frustum. This
application still contains many experimental features and is not yet
documented, but we encourage users to try it out and report bugs and feature
requests.

PVBlot is a command tool for batch or interactive processing of Exodus data
files. It is provided as a plugin. The commands create various mesh
visualzations and XY plots of variable versus time, or variable versus
variable. The plugin adds an interactive pvblot console to the ParaView
Tools menu. Documentation for PVBlot is built into the tool, just type
'help' or 'help '. The SierraTools plugin provides pvblot-like features but
exposes the functionality through toolbar buttons and dialogs in place of
text commands.

There are several other fixes including those for charting and plotting,
wireframes for quadratic surfaces, and for dealing with temporal ranges.

For developers, this release includes major changes to the core ParaView
libraries making it easier to create and deploy custom applications based on
the ParaView framework. This enables developers to create applications with
fundamentally different workflows than that of ParaView while still
leveraging ParaView's parallel processing and large data visualization
capabilities. Search for "Writing Custom Applications" on the ParaView Wiki
for details.

The plugin framework has undergone an overhaul as well, making it easier to
debug issues with loading of plugins as well as support for importing
plugins in static applications.

Starting with ParaView 3.8, we will be releasing development binaries for
ParaView, which will make it easier for developers to build and distribute
plugins that are compatible with the binaries downloaded from our website.
These development binaries will be available shortly.

As always, we rely on your feedback to make ParaView better. Please use
http://paraview.uservoice.com/ or click on the "Tell us what you think" link
on paraview.org to leave your feedback and vote for new features.

The ParaView Team.
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