ParaView 2.6 Released

The ParaView 2.6 release (version 2.6.1) is now available for download from the ParaView website (www.paraview.org/HTML/Download.html). It is also available through CVS; the tag is ParaView-2-6. There have been several changes since the 2.4 release of ParaView; they include the following:

• Parallel uniform rectilinear grid volume rendering (vtkImageData)
• New algorithms for parallel unstructured grid volume rendering
• Hardware accelerated offscreen rendering using OpenGL framebuffers (supported on all platforms)
• Improved multi-block support
• Improved AMR support
• Animation saving with ffmpeg
• The mesh quality filter now uses the verdict library (more quality measures)
• New readers: FLUENT, OpenFOAM, MFIX, LSDyna, AcuSolve
• Gradient filter for unstructured data
• Picking/Probing/Data Analysis filter improvements:
  • Fix lockup when some nodes lack data in parallel.
  • Use time values from the reader for the X axis.
  • Save changes in state, trace, and batch files.
  • Turn on the Exodus reader’s point data global id array by default.
  • Allow the Data Analysis filter to open data sets that lack point data.
  • Fix a bug that occurred in parallel when data arrays were ordered differently.
• Surface Extraction improvements:
  • Let the volume rendering display ignore non-tetrahedral
  • cells when volume rendering tetrahedral data.
  • Create a vtkOriginalCellIds array to track which 3D cells produce each 2D surface cell.
  • If all the cells in an unstructured grid are already simplices, just copy the input to the output.
• GLOBALIDS:
  • Add a new attribute type, GLOBALID, which will not be copied piecemeal or interpolated. Ids need to be
  protected throughout the pipeline because they are identifiers, and not numbers per se, thus algebraic
  operations on them are undefined.
• D3 filter improvements:
  • Make the D3 filter use vtkIdType instead of int everywhere internally for globalid arrays.
  • Update Exodus to deal with globalids stored in vtkIdType arrays. 
• Miscellaneous bug fixes:
  • The GUI page for the Integrate Attributes filter updates while animations progress.
  • AnimationSceneProxy – Fix a segfault when iren (vtkRenderWindowInteractor) is null.
  • XMLWriter – strip trailing whitespace from filenames.
• Composite Rendering improvement:
  • Turn off multisampling to prevent RLE (run-length encoding) bleeding.

This screen shot shows regular rectilinear grid (vtkImageData) volume rendering in ParaView
2.6. The data is courtesy of the Terascale Supernova Initiative (http://www.phy.ornl.gov/tsi).