[vtkusers] ANN: VTK 5.8.0 Available for download

[David Partyka]

Hello All,


VTK 5.8.0 Release:


Kitware and the VTK team are pleased to announce the availability of VTK
5.8.0 for download on the VTK download page  (
http://vtk.org/VTK/resources/software.html). VTK 5.8.0 is a major release
containing several noteworthy additions and improvements.

The VTK 5.8.0 release will be providing binary packages of the vtk tcl
interpreter and vtkpython available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux,
which will be available soon on the download page.


The Python wrappers for this release have been expanded to include many
classes, methods, and constants that were not previously wrapped.  This
includes the automatic wrapping of three templated classes (vtkSparseArray,
vtkDenseArray, and vtkVector), and several important lightweight VTK types
such as vtkVariant that are not derived from vtkObject.  The wrapping of VTK
methods now supports unicode strings arguments, two-dimensional array
arguments, pass-by-reference, and default argument values.  In addition, an
expanded parser and preprocessor for the wrappers have enabled automatic
typedef resolution and wrapping of all VTK constants.  The Python wrappers
also have a new PyQt translation layer that allows VTK objects to be passed
to PyQt methods and vice versa.  As part of the wrapper improvement effort,
the code for the wrappers has been reorganized and cleaned up to make it
easier to expand and maintain.


VTK charts have been updated to make use of the 2D scene, with new text
rendering and improved OpenGL rendering routines. New chart types such as
pie charts and 2D histograms have been added. The scatter plot and parallel
coordinate plots can be colored by a scalar array, and multiple charts can
now be rendered in the same scene. The old Qt-based charts have now been
deprecated, and are not built by default.


VTK 5.8.0 now supports polyhedron cells, which can be applied to
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and other similar applications. Support
for polyhedron cell type includes the addition of a new cell class called
vtkPolyhedron that implements common APIs of vtkCell3D, the extension of
vtkUnstructuredGrid for storage and access, and modification of
vtkXMLUnstructuredGridReader/Writer for I/O to accommodate polyhedron
meshes. Additionally, a mean value coordinates (MVC) interpolation method,
implemented as a filter called vtkMeanValueCoordinateInterpolator, has been
added. This filter is used to smoothly interpolate/extrapolate point
attributes (scalars, vectors, etc.) at a given point interior, exterior or
on the surface of polyhedron cells.


A new GPU based mapper, vtkGlyph3DMapper, is now available. It is similar to
the vtkGlyph3D filter except that it uses the GPU to do the glyphing,
differentiating it from a vtkPolyDataAlgorithm.  In the case where there is
a large number of complex glyphs, this results in a significant reduction in
memory usage and great increase in performance.  The mapper provides the
ability to color, scale and orient each glyph individually as well as the
ability to glyph only a subset of the input points via masking.


VTK now contains HDF5 1.8.5, which has been migrated out of ParaView. This
allows VTK developers to easily utilize HDF5 storage in their readers. In
future VTK releases, we will integrate HDF5 storage into vtkNetCDF as well.


As always, we value your feedback. Please report any issues on the VTK
mailing list (http://www.vtk.org/VTK/help/mailing.html) or the vtk bug
tracker (vtk.org/Bug).
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