VTK 8.2.0-rc1 ready for testing

The VTK maintenance team is happy to announce that VTK 8.2 has entered the release candidate stage!

You can find the source, data and documentation tarballs here:

http://www.vtk.org/download/#candidate

Take a look at the VTK wiki for a complete list of API changes in v8.2.0 over the previous version.

Please try this version of VTK, and report any issues to the bug tracker so that we can try to address them before VTK 8.2.0 final. Kindly set the 8.2 milestone on your issue and merge requests for 8.2 to ensure that they are tracked during the remainder of the release process. Further, please base / rebase all 8.2 target branches off of the v8.2.0.rc1 tag to ensure minimal merge conflicts with the release and master branches.

The official release notes will be available when VTK 8.2.0 final is finished in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here is a preview of the significant changes and new features:

• Support for the TCL, Qt4 and the legacy fixed function OpenGL backend have been dropped. Meanwhile support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 has been deprecated.
• vtkTestOpenGLVersion.h is a way for applications to test required OpenGL capabilities at startup on Windows and fall back to Mesa software rendering if necessary.
• In Python the new “import vtkmodules” is significantly faster than “import vtk”.
• The new vtkCellValidator filter identifies buggy cells in datasets, testing for wrong numbers of points, intersecting edges, intersecting faces, noncontiguous edges, nonconvex, and incorrectly oriented faces.
• The new vtkContour3DLinearGrid filter gives ~10-20x or greater speedups or unstructured grids consisting of linear cells.
• Eight VTK-m filters have been exposed into VTK and several VTK-m filters can now run on either CUDA, TBB or OpenMP.
• Filters to extract selections have been revamped to support boolean combinations. The improved vtkExtractSelection filter (the previously implementations is still available as vtkExtractSelectionLegacy) uses a hierarchy of vtkSelector classes to support different types of selections.
• The hardware selector transfers less data between the CPU and GPU. This makes it significantly faster for high resolution meshes.
• The vtkAMReXParticlesReader reads particle data from AMReX plotfiles.
• The vtkOBJImporter has many fixes and improvements in 8.2.
• The new vtkFFMPEGVideoSource decodes video files into images and audio data.
• VTK now supports Oculus touch controllers.
• One can now modify or use custom shaders with the GPU volume mapper to tweak final rendering.
• vtkWeb remote rendering was optimized with a new protocol that minimizes bandwidth.

We hope you enjoy this release of VTK!

As always, contact Kitware and the mailing lists for assistance.