Paraview is an open source application, which supports multiple platforms and is capable of visualizing data sets of variable sizes ranging from small ones down to the large sized bulky ones. The application incorporates a highly flexible, intuitive user interface, which makes it a truly easy-to-use program.
The software makes use of the Visualization Tool Kit (VTK) internally, which is also an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics. It highly aids in performing image processing and visualization and is popularly used by many researchers and developers, comprising of a C++ class library, along with many interpreted interface layers such as Tcl/Tk, Python and Java.
Paraview performs data processing and acts a powerful rendering engine featuring the amazingly simple, yet effective user interface written using Qt. Basically, ParaView runs on distributed as well as shared memory for both single and parallel processor systems.
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The application has been run successfully on almost all platforms right from Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, down to several other Unix workstations, supercomputers and clusters thus delivering awesome functionality over virtually any platform.
v3.1 [Dec 31, 2009]
- includes several performance improvements, bug fixes for users, and plenty of new features for plugin and application developers.
- the plugin loading and management dialog was redesigned to make it easier to load plugins. It's now possible to configure plugins to be auto-loaded every time ParaView starts.
- a couple of GPU-based rendering/visualization techniques have been incorporated along with GPU-based volume rendering support for 3D image volumes, which is accessible through the "Volume Mapper" option on the Display tab. Support for Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is available as a plugin; this support can be used for visualizing vector fields over arbitrary surfaces.
- ParaView now includes (in source form only) an interface to the University of Utah's Manta interactive software ray tracing engine. The Manta plugin provides a new 3D View type which uses Manta instead of OpenGL for rendering. The plugin is primarily being developed for visualization of large datasets on parallel machines. In single processor configuration it has the benefit of allowing realistic rendering effects such as shadows, translucency and reflection.
- for climate simulation folks, this release includes support for NetCDF with CF (Climate and Forecast) conventions. For cosmology researchers, the Cosmo plugin has been substantially revised. The major improvement is that the plugin now works in a data parallel fashion, so that it can be used with higher resolution simulation results.
- AdaptiveParaView, a new experimental application developed using the ParaView application framework is also now available in source format. Like StreamingParaView, AdaptiveParaView processes structured datasets in a piecewise fashion, omitting pieces which are unimportant, in order to make it possible to visualize datasets which do not otherwise fit in RAM.
- PVBlot is a command tool for batch or interactive processing of Exodus data files. It is provided as a plugin. The commands create various mesh visualzations and XY plots of variable versus time, or variable versus variable. The plugin adds an interactive pvblot console to the ParaView Tools menu. Documentation for PVBlot is built into the tool, just type 'help' or 'help '. The SierraTools plugin provides pvblot-like features but exposes the functionality through toolbar buttons and dialogs in place of text commands.
