VTK Designer 2.7.1 is now out. The last release was on 14th of October 2008. Some changes we have since then are
1. Support for Bezier Surfaces. Custom classes from VCL: vtkBezierSurfaceSource and vtkBezierSurfaceWidget are now supported.
2. Thumbnail preview of the canvas is now shown.
3. Support for color presents in vtkLookupTable. You can right click on any vtkLookupTable node to select a color preset. The code behind this was contributed by Prof. Vijay Natarajan of IISc Bangalore.
4. The terrain data-file loader now inserts a vtkLookupTable into the pipeline to let users take advantage of the color presents.
5. New tools are now included in this release
– ComponentGen : This tool generates a code template for a new component that you can use with VTK Designer 2
– VNFComponentGen : This tool generates a code template for new “visualization node factory” components. This tool is priceless if you want to add components that provide visualization nodes that can be dragged from the node class explorer and dropped on the canvas.
– VisNodeGen : This tool generates a code template for a new node (or wrapper). You can include the generated code in existing components.
(Documentation for these tools are underway and they will be released soon. However, the tool itself provides some simple documentation when you execute it with no parameters)
6. Added a vtkWedgeSource algorithm and supported it in VTK Designer 2
7. Fixed scriptable methods for vtkProp3D nodes that dealt with transformations.
8. Added support for project templates in VTK Designer. You can now save a any pipeline as a template that you can open later on and fill in details. Double click on the “Project” menu strip group label to see a drawer widget from where you can load and save templates
You can download the new versions of VTK Designer 2 in a couple of hours time.
VTK Designer 2.6.1 has had a decent adoption. Shown below is a graph of installer downloads. We dont have a count of people who have compiled from the source and/or SVN checkout. Besides we have added about 100 or so users through workshops on visualization, haptics and OpenGL conducted by us.
Looking forward to see how 2.7.1 shapes up.