[vtkusers] AMR, ChomboVis, and VTK...

[Terry J. Ligocki]

We have talked about and looked at porting ChomboVis to VTK 4.x.  One of 
the main difficulties with doing this is that ChomboVis interrupts the 
VTK 3.2 pipeline in a deliberate fashion and this doesn't port directly 
to VTK 4.x (as far as we can understand things).  In addition, we are 
currently being funded to extend functionality (data analysis, embedded 
boundaries, etc.) and not to port to VTK 4.x (unless we can do it 
quickly and reliably!).

We would like to be using VTK 4.x for a number of reasons (some of which 
you mention below) but this probably won't be the case for awhile.  We 
may end up porting to directly to the next major revision of VTK (5.x?).

We do provide an "ChomboVis and everything" tarball which, at least, 
encapsulates all our dependencies under one directory and only uses the 
things built there for ChomboVis - i.e., the initial script sets all the 
path, library directories, etc. when it runs.

Also, I hope this thread isn't getting too rarefied/tangential for the 
general VTK users e-mail list.  If so, please let me know and I'll take 
further commentaries off-line.

        Terry J. (Ligocki, tjligocki at lbl.gov)
        Applied Numerical Algorithms Group
        Computer Research Division
        Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Jean M. Favre wrote:

> Terry J. Ligocki wrote:
>
>> We have developed a visualization package called ChomboVis (using VTK 
>> via Python) for visualizing the AMR datasets produced by our AMR 
>> library, Chombo.  You can find out more about ChomboVis at 
>> http://seesar.lbl.gov/anag/chombo/chombovis.html and more about 
>> Chombo at http://seesar.lbl.gov/anag/chombo/index.html . Both are 
>> being actively developed and maintained.
>
> As far as I know, ChomboVis still uses the old vtk3.2 kit. Is there 
> any plan in your active development to move to the newer 4.x support 
> for VTK? It is kinda of a pain to have to maintain the old vtk libs 
> and if one wants to personalize ChomboVis, it is awkward to remember 
> the older styles of vtk3.2 programming, and to not be able to use the 
> newer features and classes of vtk4.x.