[vtk-developers] Status

[Andrew Maclean]

Following on ...

Additionally there have been the parametric classes, nicely extended and
enhanced by Will (yes there is documentation for these classes as a PDF).
Also vtkParticleFilter has been enhanced to process text and binary files.

Personally I feel that getting rid of the patented directory is an excellent
idea. However, if you are going to branch VTK 5.0 soon could I suggest that
you wait until the August patents expire? I believe it is only MarchingCubes
but I am not sure.

Some of the documentation for existing classes needs to be updated/enhanced.
If there is any interest I would be happy to look through the classes that I
have used to see what documentation needs to be enhanced/added.

All in all I think VTK has come a long way in the past year or so
(especially in the last few weeks!). Thanks to all at Kitware and other
developers.
 
Andrew



-----Original Message-----
From: vtk-developers-bounces+a.maclean=cas.edu.au at vtk.org
[mailto:vtk-developers-bounces+a.maclean=cas.edu.au at vtk.org] On Behalf Of
Ken Martin
Sent: Saturday, 4 June 2005 01:03
To: 'VTK Developers'
Subject: [vtk-developers] Status

Well now seems like a fine time for a status update and to raise a couple
issues. For starters I hope to branch a VTK 5.0 soon. I know we have been
saying that for some time but I've had little time to cleanup/fix issues in
the current CVS and there have been some features I was waiting for such as
3D hardware Volume Rendering and some time/field support. One change that I
would like to make is to remove the patented directory. Kitware has removed
its license from Synchronized Templates and the Marching Cubes patent
expires soon. I plan on moving the MC based classes into Graphics and
removing the other patented classes. The patented directory is a legal
liability issue and now that the MC patent is expiring I think we can live
without the other classes. Maybe GE can put a link to them for the people
who have patent licenses to use them.  Synchronized Templates has been moved
into Contour filter and the cutter has also been modified to use
Synchronized Templates so both should be much faster for data types other
than Unstructured Grid. 

The InputScalarsSelection methods that were not in VTK 4.2 but snuck into
the 4.4 interim release have been removed and replaced with a new poorly
documented but more general method. I had asked for those methods to not be
put into VTK because I had design issues with how they were implemented and
we specifically removed them from the 4.2 release. If anyone wants to
provide backwards compatibility methods for them feel free. Many filters
still do not use the new general input array selection methods. It is easy
to convert filters to use these methods and I'll try to make progress on
that as time permits.

There is some work happening (not me) on providing a simple C and Fortran
interface to the VTK XML file writers so that C and Fortran codes can write
out the XML file formats for VTK.

The folks at Sandia National Labs (and Elemtech) have contributed some nice
improvements to the QT bindings for VTK and have added a bunch of nifty new
classes like the OpenGL extension manager and others.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other recent developments but that is all I
can think of right now. Others feel free to chime in on recent changes and
additions and of course suggestions, comments, etc are welcome.

Thanks
Ken




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