Published October 10, 2008

Related sites: Paraview, Scientific Vis

ParaView 3.4 Released

ParaView 3.4 release is now available for download from the ParaView website. It is also available through CVS; the tag is ParaView-3-4. Since the 3.2 release, we have been focusing on usability; 3.4 contains many improvements and bug fixes.

The major changes since 3.4 are:

• VTK and ParaView are now licensed under the BSD license as opposed to modified BSD.
• The multi-block and AMR support was improved significantly. Almost all filters, spreadsheet view and charts now support these datasets.
• The selection capabilities of ParaView were significantly improved. For details, see the July 2008 Kitware Source.

New features

• Support for plotting multiple point/cell values over time.
• Support for picking end-points of line widgets using ‘p’.
• Support for scene exporters. Supported formats are X3D (binary and ascii), VRML 2 and POV (Persistence of Vision Raytracer).
• Temporal statistics filter that can be used to find average, min, max and standard deviation of arrays over time.
• 2D views / slice representation for volumes (vtkImage-Data).
• Box and sphere widgets for slicing and clipping.
• Cube axes used to show scale of a dataset.
• Multiple selections using ctrl (command on Mac). When performing selection after the first time, hold ctrl to add to the existing selection.

Improvements to Existing Features

• Plug-in improvements.
• Added an option to disable off-screen rendering while saving images. This option should be turned on if ParaView crashes when saving images.
  Changed the default width of the scalar bar; also tweaked the way scalar bar scaling works.
• Improved partial array support (when an array exists only in some of the blocks of a multi-block dataset).
• Fixed many widgets for floating point numbers, enabling higher precision.

Reader and Writer Improvements

• Readers for MFIX and Fluent.
• Support for loading file series from the command line as well as from the recent file menu.
• Support for saving multi-block polygonal datasets as a collection
  of STL or PLY files.
• Support for file series of XML based VTK files.
• Updated XDMF reader to XDMF 2.

For a complete list of features and fixes, see the ParaView 3.4 Release Notes on the ParaView Wiki.