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

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

Hi John,

The default will remain the existing painters/mappers and you can
continue to use them. I will work on adding documentation but it is
sparse at this stage. What I merged is a first-pass implementation
where I am sure further changes will be necessary (we know of several
missing features). At the high level they do not use/implement any of
the painter API, but the painter API in Rendering/Core remains
untouched - we do not intend to add the painter API to these mappers.
They implement many of the classes in Rendering/Core, and use the same
object factory override mechanism. You could port the mapper API you
need into your own custom mapper, and even look at remote modules that
we will work on adding soon.

We have not addressed extension of the mappers, and so it would be
premature to attempt it. We will get to that, and part of the
motivation of merging this branch is to start merging more frequently
and benefit from wider testing. I will be working towards getting
ParaView to build against the new rendering backend, but that is not
yet possible as several of the rendering modules it uses have hard
dependencies on the existing Rendering/OpenGL module.

I hope that makes things a little clearer, and I will work on adding
some documentation as things stabilize. The way in which we render
most geometry has changed in quite significant ways in order to take
advantage of modern OpenGL APIs in efficient ways

Thanks,

Marcus

On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 8:05 AM, Biddiscombe, John A. <biddisco at cscs.ch> wrote:
> Marcus,
>
> I've got quite a lot of custom rendering modules and would like to add some extra cuda render passes to my paraview representations - are the changes you are making/have made to the vtk rendering documented anywhere so I can see what impact this will/does have on existing painters/mappers etc?
>
> thanks
>
> JB
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: vtk-developers [mailto:vtk-developers-bounces at vtk.org] On Behalf Of Marcus D. Hanwell
> Sent: 20 June 2014 05:38
> To: VTK Developers
> Subject: [vtk-developers] Merging of new rendering branch to VTK
>
> 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
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