ParaView 4.1.0 available for download

ParaView 4.1.0 is now available for download. With about 170 issues resolved, this release includes several bug fixes and feature enhancements. For a detailed list of issues resolved, refer to the change log. Some of the notable enhancements in this release are as follows:

Redesigned Color Map Editor panel

This release introduces a completely designed panel for editing color and opacity transfer functions for scalar coloring. The panel, which is now a dockable widget, instead of a popup dialog, makes it easier to edit transfer functions as well as edit labels and annotations on the color legend or scalar bar. This also makes it easier to access some of the functionality introduced in the previous version of ParaView, such as categorical colors. It is now easier to edit transfer functions when using log scaling as the transfer function editor view now switches to log space.

Enhancements to Find Data dialog

Find Data dialog, introduced several versions ago, has quickly become of the main mechanisms for creating new selections. However, until now, if the user created selection using some other mechanism, such as selecting cells in the 3D view, the Find Data dialog could not be used to inspect that selection. One had to use what was called the Selection Inspector. That has now been changed. Find Data dialog has been updated to always show the active selection, no matter how it was created.

Selection Inspector panel has been removed. Selection Inspector was primarily used to control how selections are labelled, their font properties, etc. One can affect these directly from the Find Data dialog or the new Selection Display Inspector which is dockable panel specially designed for picking selection labels, label properties, or showing the selection frustum for frustum based selections.

Enhancements for interactions with Plots

Inspired by plots in matplotlib, individual axes in line and bar charts can  now be zoomed by right-clicking and dragging along the x- or y- axis. Of course, one can still drag diagonally to scale both axes as before. Also the the user interactions for making new selections in line chart view have been cleaned up to be more consistent with the render view.

Support for Python-based views

This release adds mechanisms to enable Python developers to integrate views that use libraries such as matplotlib for rendering. This will make it possible to take ParaView’s charting capabilities even further. More details on how to create such views can be found on Kitware blog.

ParaView Catalyst: Zero-Copy infrastructure for transferring data

A set of experimental interfaces have been added for reusing simulation memory in portions of a Catalyst pipeline. A vtkMappedDataArray subclass may be used for attribute/coordinate arrays, and vtkMappedUnstructuredGrid is used for dataset topologies. More information can be found an the ParaView Wiki.

ParaView Catalyst: Editions

Several new editions of ParaView Catalyst are now available for download and are routinely built and tested. These editions are:

SurfaceLIC and support for Parallel Rendering

One of the notable community contributions for this release includes extensions to the ParaView Line Integral Convolution contributed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Details can be found on the Wiki (http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Line_Integral_Convolution). The implementation has been designed to work with composite data in parallel and includes a number of customizations that facilitate interactive data exploration.

Surface LIC showing coherent structures in the magnetic fields of turbulent plasma.

Updates to ParaViewWeb

ParaViewWeb was integrated into ParaView binaries in the previous release. This release includes several fixes and enhancements to simplify use and deployment as well as updates to the WebGL rendering support. This implementation supports modern browsers with WebSocket capabilities including Safari 6+, Chrome 14+, Firefox 11+ and IE 10+.