VTK 6.3 Enters Release Candidate Stage

The VTK development team is pleased to announce that VTK 6.3 has entered the release candidate stage! The official release notes will be made available when the final release occurs in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here is a preview:

VTK 6.3 offers new features such as a multithreaded Gaussian splatter class and vtkPlotArea for rendering area (or range) plots. VTK 6.3 also adds compiler uplifts, an OpenMP backend for vtkSMPTools, an MPI-IO backend for PLOT3D reader, and several new types of support. For example, multithreading support in the vtkSampleFunction and support for OpenGL 3.2 in the OpenGL2 backend are now available.

What is more, VTK 6.3 enables writing side and node sets in Exodus files, skipping NaN values in vtkDataArray::GetRange(), and reading compressed TIFF files with sub-extents. In other highlights of the release, text rendering respects the DPI of the vtkWindow and vtkAxis respects the TileScale setting of vtkWindow.

For the source, data, and new vtkpython binary packages, please visit VTK’s website.

We hope you enjoy this release of VTK! Please try it out, and report any issues to the mailing list or the bug tracker. As always, you can contact Kitware for assistance leveraging VTK for your HPC and visualization needs.