[vtk-developers] Merging of new rendering branch to VTK

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

Hi,

We have been hard at work on new rendering code for VTK that makes use
of OpenGL 2.1+, and moves to modernize our rendering code. We have
also added new CMake capabilities to specify a rendering backend, this
defaults to the existing rendering code but can be swapped out for the
new. This has been in development for several months, and we intend to
merge it to master tomorrow.

If you want to build the new rendering modules they are mutually
exclusive of the old rendering modules, as it was necessary to reuse
the same class names etc. They depend upon GLEW and Eigen at this
time, and I have not yet done the work to add either as third party
modules (I will get to it). We will be adding several dashboards to
test the new rendering backend next week.

I intend to merge the main branch tomorrow, and will monitor the
dashboard for issues over the weekend (using the existing OpenGL
implementation). Next week we will add dashboard submissions testing
the new rendering backend. We will then attempt to merge updates to
this new rendering code more regularly. There are some pretty
significant rendering improvements, and we will summarize these in the
coming weeks too.

Hopefully disruption to master will be minimal, please let me know if
you think there is anything I missed. I am really excited to get some
of this code to a wider group, and hope to begin showcasing some of
the progress we have made.

Thanks,

Marcus