Published March 13, 2007

Related sites: Scientific Vis, Paraview

ParaView III Alpha Release

In March 2007 a new snapshot (2.9.9) of the alpha release of ParaView III was created. This snapshot includes binaries for Windows, Linux (32 and 64 bit) and Mac OS X. To download the snapshot, visit paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_snapshots. The following new features have been added over the past few months.

• Support for Plugins: ParaView 3 provides much more powerful plugin support than that provided by ParaView 2. Examples are provided along with the source (in ParaView3/Examples/Plugins). Detailed documentation is available at http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Plugin_HowTo. 
• Extended Animation Support: ParaView 3 now makes it possible to animate the Camera, Cut/Clip planes, etc. There is no animation track editor at this point.
• Selection: We are working on improving the selection mechanism. Currently users can select cells/points by ids, locations, or thresholds. Surface as well as frustum selections through the data are now possible.
• Plotting: Plot views are now a part of the main view. Splitting a view no longer creates a 3D render view by default. Users can change the view type by right clicking on the view's title bar. Any 1D rectilinear grid data can now be plotted either as an XY Line Plot or a Bar Chart. 
• Lookup Tables: The dialog for editing color lookup tables has been improved.
• Xdmf Reader: Support for reading Xdmf files has now been enabled.

Please note that ParaView 3 now requires Qt 4.2.2 to build. In the coming month, the ParaView development team will continue to work on selection enhancements, improvements to the Undo/Redo framework, volume rendering support, and improvements to the color map editor for both surface and volume data. Also a beta release for ParaView 3 will be created.