[vtk-developers] Pay attention, grab a beer: VTK 5.0

[Bill Lorensen]

No problem here, unless there is an internal API change. If this is the 
case, can we defer until we make a new 4.x release? I'd like to freeze all 
API changes until we have a transition plan for vtk 4.x.

Bill

At 05:18 PM 11/3/2003, Lisa Avila wrote:
>Hello,
>
>
>>6. Volume rendering changes (support unstructured volume rendering)
>>
>>We (with Sandia Natl Lab) are adding volume rendering support for 
>>unstructured
>>grids. There are some changes to the volume rendering classes (new classes,
>>reorganization of old classes). We believe that we can do this without
>>impacting the existing class hierarchy.
>
>There will be a (minor?) API change associated with this item: the mapper 
>of a volume will change from being a vtkVolumeMapper to a 
>vtkAbstractVolumeMapper. A vtkAbstractVolumeMapper returns vtkDataSet * 
>from the GetInput() method. vtkVolumeMapper will be a subclass of 
>vtkAbstractVolumeMapper, and will return (as usual) a vtkImageData * from 
>GetInput(). This means if you had any code that looked like this: 
>volume->GetMapper()->GetInput() and you assumed the return type was 
>vtkImageData *, then your code would break. Also, the cropping methods are 
>not available from the vtkAbstractVolumeMapper level, so you could no 
>longer do volume->GetMapper()->CroppingOn() or similar calls.
>
>I believe the impact of this will be minor. For example, none of the VTK 
>examples break due to this change. In addition, Kitware has a fairly large 
>volume visualization application that requires no modifications to work 
>with this change.
>
>Making this change allows us to support subclasses of 
>vtkAbstractVolumeMapper that accept vtkUnstructuredGrid as input, while 
>using the exact same vtkVolume and vtkVolumeProperty to hold the 
>properties of the volume. Users will need to choose the correct type of 
>mapper (based on their input data).
>
>Any comments? I plan to begin checking in these changes next week.
>
>
>Lisa
>
>
>
>
>
>
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