ITK Git master has reached a major milestone — Python wrapping now builds and cleanly passes tests on the default compilers for MacOSX, Linux, and Windows! Python bindings make the extensive library of scientific image analysis algorithms embodied in the Insight Toolkit available to the rich scientific Python ecosystem. The ITK bindings complement excellent Python wrappings already available for SimpleITK, the simplified API […]

Buildbot Primer for VTK and ParaView
May 5, 2015
This post is geared towards VTK, ParaView, and CMB developers who are using Gitlab to contribute changes to these open source projects. The automated testing infrastructure used by these projects has several parts: Buildbot is used to monitor the git repositories and schedule builds and tests when merge requests are created or the integration branches (master/release) are changed. […]

Adding in Logic to a ParaView Catalyst Python Script
April 30, 2015
One of the concerns I hear often about in situ analysis and visualization is that there’s the possibility that a full simulation run can be wasted if the proper in situ pipeline isn’t set up properly a priori. One of the key capabilities of ParaView Catalyst is being able to use a Python script to […]

C/C++ Development for Windows Sans Windows
April 22, 2015
Introduction An open source development environment is preferred by many developers because of its powerful and effective tools. Additionally, it is desireable to avoid the expense of compiler licenses, proprietary operating systems, and hardware when possible. In the age of cloud-based testing and deployment, the ability to work from an open source, Linux stack […]

Visualizing Biological Data (VIZBI) 2015
April 21, 2015
From March 23 to March 27, 2015, I attended the VizBi conference at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA. The conference featured the latest in visualizations in the life sciences community, including some impressive molecular animations. At the conference, I presented a poster (along with Curtis Lisle, Anthony Wehrer, Luke Harmon, Robert […]

SIAM 2015
April 17, 2015
SIAM’s Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) conference was held this year in Salt Lake City. Over one thousand people attended the conference, which featured minisymposia, minitutorials, and keynote addresses. The conference had a lot to offer, and Kitware participated in several activities. On the first day of the conference, Bill Hoffman and Andy Bauer attended […]

Recent Releases
April 16, 2015
VTK 6.2.0 Released The VTK development team is pleased to announce that VTK 6.2.0 is ready for download. In this release, VTK’s use of parallelism in modern architectures continues to mature. In terms of managing pieces and extents in the pipeline, for example, VTK’s readers are now responsible for implementing translation, and its parallel filters […]

Testing in the Cloud The flexibility of cloud computing platforms can be leveraged to provide scalable continuous integration testing. Using cloud computing resources effectively, however, requires the coordination of a robust software infrastructure. When a developer on a large open-source project finishes a draft of a patch, he or she should not have to wait […]

Kitware News
April 16, 2015
Climate Data Analysis Team Receives Award & Releases New Project Version The development team for the project “Ultrascale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT)” was recently selected as the 2015 recipient of the National Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer’s (FLC) Interagency Partnership Award. The selection came shortly after the release of UV-CDAT version 2.1.0. […]

MAP-Tk 0.5.0 Release!
March 17, 2015
MAP-Tk 0.5.0 Release The MAP-Tk 0.5.0 release offers new functionality including preliminary support for essential matrix estimation and camera initialization algorithms. It further updates the bundle adjustment tool to estimate a similarity transformation to place results in a canonical coordinate system when external constraints are not provided on position, orientation, and scale. In addition, the […]

VTK 6.2.0
March 5, 2015
The VTK development team is happy to announce that VTK 6.2.0 is ready. Special thanks go out to everyone who tested and provided input and fixes during the release candidate cycle. You can find the source, data, and vtkpython binary packages here: http://www.vtk.org/VTK/resources/software.html VTK’s use of the parallelism available in modern architectures continues to mature. […]

PHASTA + ParaView Catalyst: In Situ CFD Analysis at 256K MPI processes on BG/Q Mira
February 24, 2015
One of the things I really love about working on open-source projects is seeing where people take the things I’ve worked on. The latest example of this that just blew me away was with a CFD code called PHASTA, led by Ken Jansen at UC Boulder. Short for Parallel Hierarchic Adaptive Stabilized Transient Analysis, six […]

ITK 4.7.1 has been released!
February 18, 2015
On behalf of the Insight Toolkit Community, we are happy to announce the release of ITK 4.7.1! Get it now! This is a patch release that addresses critical issues, regressions, important documentation, and compiler support. The 4.7.1 release fixes improves Visual Studio support, addresses Python wrapping runtime warnings, includes fixes for the ITK Software Guide, […]

VTK 6.2.0.rc1 is Ready for Testing!
February 16, 2015
VTK 6.2 has entered the release candidate stage. You can find the source, data, and new vtkpython binary packages here: http://www.vtk.org/VTK/resources/software.html#latestcand Please try this version of VTK and report any issues to the list or the bug tracker so that we can try to address them before VTK 6.2.0 final. Some […]

ParaView and Project Tango: Loading Data
February 6, 2015
Editors Note: In 2017/2018 Google shut down Project Tango in favor of ARCore. While ParaView is under active development, and Kitware still does a lot of work with point clouds, we no longer have working versions of the Project Tango device APKs referenced in this post. Introduction We use ParaView for many of our our […]

Interacting with views in ParaView Python (pvpython)
February 3, 2015
We recently added new functionality to ParaView to support interacting with the view when using pvpython. This is supported as of nightly version (v4.3.1-122-g1a5724d) and will included in the next stable release (version 4.4). Previously, users could not interact with any Render View, or Bar Chart View etc., when running pvpython or pvbatch. While it still doesn't make sense to support interaction when […]

Ray-Casting & Ray-Tracing with VTK
January 30, 2015
VTK has long evolved beyond just visualization. It offers some amazing functionality that just cannot be found elsewhere. Two examples are the ‘ray-casting’ and, consequentially, ‘ray-tracing’ capabilities provided by the vtkOBBTree class. In this article, I would like to introduce these capabilities and show examples of ray-casting and ray-tracing performed exclusively through Python, a dash […]

Introducing Tangelo
January 30, 2015
Over the past two years, we have been developing Tangelo [1] in the pursuit of rich web applications for solving problems, both old and new. We recently passed 2,000 commits in the repository [2], and Tangelo will soon be ready for prime time. This article aims to inform you more about the technology with a […]
