Coming Soon: ParaView 3.6

May 4, 2009

Kitware and Sandia National Laboratories are getting ready for the next major release of ParaView, version 3.6. The binaries and sources will be available for download upon release from the ParaView website. This release includes several new features along with plenty of bug fixes addressing a multitude of usability and stability issues, including those affecting parallel volume rendering.

Based on user feedback, ParaView’s Python API has undergone a major overhaul. The new simplified scripting interface makes it easier to write procedural scripts mimicking the steps users would follow when using the GUI to perform tasks such as creating sources, applying filters, etc. We are also working on saving trace as Python scripts, making it easier for beginners to get familiar with the ParaView Python API. Details on the new scripting API can be found on the ParaView Wiki.

We have been experimenting with adding support for additional file formats such as CGNS, Silo, and Tecplot using a third party application. Since this is an experimental feature, only the Linux and Windows binaries distributed from our website support these new file formats.

ParaView now natively supports tabular data-structures thus improving support for CSV files including importing CSV files as point-sets or structured grids. This version also includes several filters for statistical analysis of the data.

We’ve completely redesigned the charting/plotting components with several performance fixes and usability improvements. Now data values can be plotted along curves obtained by slicing surfaces with planes, etc. Additionally, arrays can be plotted from arbitrary datasets directly, without having to employ the plot over line or any such filter.

In an effort to better support animations involving the camera, we have added support for specifying camera movements along splines or orbiting objects in space.

Apart from these enhancements, ParaView now ships with a brand new application developed on top of the ParaView Application Framework named OverView. OverView is a generalization of the ParaView scientific visualization application and was designed to support the ingestion, processing and display of informatics data. The ParaView client-server architecture provides a mature framework for performing scalable analysis on distributed memory platforms and OverView uses these capabilities to analyze informatics problems that are too large for individual workstations.

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