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

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

>>>>> "WS" == Will Schroeder <will.schroeder at kitware.com> writes:

    WS> Hi Folks- This email is worth paying attention to as it
    WS> addresses the future of VTK (namely VTK 5.0). We have had many
    WS> discussions regarding these issues here at Kitware and we'd
    WS> like to hear what some of the other developers have to
    WS> say. Some of these changes are pretty big, many are small, but
[snip]
    WS> 3. Higher-order cell support

Sounds great!  On a slightly related note are there plans for NURBS?
IIRC this kind of thing comes up on the lists from time to time.

    WS> 4. AMR/composite dataset support
    WS> 5. Use iterators to traverse collections
    WS> 6. Volume rendering changes (support unstructured volume
    WS>    rendering)
    WS> 7. Fast and slow path filter support

Very cool!

    WS> 9. Blanking support for structured data

Any plans for multi-block data support?  If it were possible to handle
different types of data per block that would really awesome!

    WS> 10. Pipeline execution reorganization
    WS> 11. Using double rather than float in API (and internal
    WS>     calculations)

Sounds good!

    WS> 12. vtkMesh class

One thing that would be really useful and something that comes up
quite often is time dependent data and time dependent algorithms.  Are
there any plans for this sort of data?  I thought that with VTK 4.0
the XML readers were supposed to make this possible.  It would be
great if VTK were able to handle time dependent data and also have
some useful algorithms for that kind of data.

I understand that some of my comments above sound like a wishlist but
it would be really nice if they were supported by VTK and this seems
like a good time to spell them out.

Thanks for the continued improvements to VTK!

cheers,
prabhu