ParaView 4.3.1 available for download

ParaView 4.3.1 is now available for download. The complete list of over 70 issues resolved, including some of the critical ones detected in 4.2, can be found on the ParaView bug tracker.

Some of the major highlights of this release are as follows:

ParaView User’s Guide

A thoroughly revised version of the ParaView Guide is being prepared for publishing. The guide is being distributed as follows:

• A CC-BY-4.0 versioned community edition (CE) PDF of the ParaView Guide is now freely available for download from the ParaView download page (under Data, Documentation, and Tutorials category).

• Full color as well as B/W printed versions of the Guide are available for purchase. Besides the open-source parts of the Guide, this printed version includes three additional chapters that cover several domain specific use-cases and case-studies including CFD, Astrophysics, Climate, and VR. The printed versions will be available within the next few weeks.

Unlike in the past where the printed versions of the Guide would lag behind the ParaView releases, we are experimenting with a new approach which enables us to update all versions of the guide as frequently as the ParaView releases themselves.

Orthographic Slice View

A new version of the Quad View plugin is now available as a standard view in ParaView, named Orthographic Slice View. This view makes it easy to look at axis aligned slices in any dataset.

Map floating point arrays to colors

This version removes the requirement that only unsigned-char arrays can be mapped to colors directly without using a color transfer function. Three or four component floating point arrays in the range [0.0, 1.0] can now be directly interpreted as colors. Simply uncheck the Map Scalars checkbox on the Properties panel.

Color mapping by string arrays

Coloring by string arrays is possible when the color map option “Interpret Values As Categories” is enabled and a set of annotations whose values are strings in the data array is defined. As with other cases where values are interpreted as categories, a set of active values can be obtained automatically from the data and defined as annotations using the tools in the Color Map Editor’s Annotations section. See the blog post about this feature for more details.

Color mapping by field data

You can now color data sets in ParaView by the value of a tuple in a field data array associated with the data set. Field data arrays in a data set now appear in the list of data arrays available to select for coloring. If a field data array is chosen, the first tuple in the array will be used to determine the color of the entire surface of the object being visualized. Tuples may have more than one component, in which case a specific element of the tuple can be selected (similar to how X, Y, or Z components can be selected for vectors) or the magnitude of the tuple can be selected instead. See the blog post for more details.

Adding active values from all visible objects

A new button in the Color Map Editor enables adding active values from all visible objects that are being colored by the array with the same name as the array coloring the active pipeline object.

Out-of-range colors

Prior to this release, values above the range of a color map were set to the color assigned to the maximum value. Likewise, values below the range of a color map were set to the color assigned to the minimum value. In this version of ParaView, you can now optionally set specific colors for values above and below the color map range.

Note to plugin/custom application developers

Please note that this will be the last release in which old style panels i.e. pqObjectPanel and subclasses will continue to work. Starting next release, all those classes will be removed.