VisIt 1.4.4 Release Notes

Welcome to VisIt's release notes page. This page describes the important enhancements and bug-fixes that were added to this release.

Features added in version 1.4.4

- Saving movies of the plots in your active visualization window is now possible within VisIt's GUI using the Save movie wizard. The Save movie wizard, located in the Main window's File menu, leads you through a set of screens that allow you to pick the resolutions and formats, output location, and generation method for your movie. Once you have completed the wizard's screens, VisIt starts making your movie. VisIt can use your current VisIt session to make your movie so you can use any processors that you have already allocated, or VisIt can start a new VisIt session, or tell you the command to use to generate your movie. If you choose to use your current VisIt session to make your movie, you will be able to watch your movie play through on screen. The movie's progress is also displayed in a Movie progress dialog so you can track VisIt's progress in generating your movie. The Movie progress dialog also provides a Cancel button if you decide to cancel your movie so you can resume working in your VisIt session.
- VisIt has been enhanced so that multiple user interfaces can be used to drive the viewer. This makes it possible to use both the GUI and the CLI on the same visualizations. It is even possible to use multiple GUI's - even custom GUI's that you have written yourself in C++ or Java. The CLI, which is itself a type of VisIt user interface, provides functions (OpenClient, OpenGUI) that can be used to connect other VisIt clients to the viewer.
- VisIt's GUI now provides a Command window that allows you to edit up to 8 Python scripts and execute them in VisIt's CLI at the click of a button. The Command window is available in the Controls menu. Saving your settings will cause the Command window's scripts to be saved so they are accessible in future VisIt sessions. Note that when VisIt executes scripts in this manner, the actual script execution is still performed by VisIt's CLI, which will display any script output in a seperate CLI window since the GUI and CLI are separate programs with little awareness of one another.
- It is now possible to export variables, materials, and meshes from your active database to a file using the new Export database window. The Export database window is available in the File menu. The new window allows you to pick the output name, directory, format, of the exported database as wells as the list of variables, meshes, or materials that will be exported. The list of available formats for exporting databases is determined by those database reader plugins that can write out data in their native file format.
- VisIt now provides an option to read all cycles and times from collections of single time-step databases (like Silo). This option allows VisIt to display the cycles and times in the selected files list in the Main window and it also allows VisIt to create meaningful cycle or time-based database correlations for these types of databases. Database correlations are used to relate multiple time-varying databases on a common time scale, with a common time slider. Since VisIt can now create accurate cycle and time database correlations for collections of single time-step databases, it is now possible to more easily compare two or more simulations using a common time scale. Since it can be expensive to read in the extra time metadata for some types of files, this option is not enabled by default but VisIt will ask if you want to read in the extra data when it needs it. You can make VisIt always read in cycles and times by choosing Try harder to get accurate cycles/times in the Preferences window. If you want this option to take effect by default, be sure to save your settings after changing the setting in the Preferences window.
- VisIt's CLI now has embedded documentation for most of its functions, making it easy to see the argument list and usage information for each function.
- VisIt now supports image annotation objects, which allow you to place logos or other graphics in your visualizations. To add an image annotation, open the Annotations window, click on the Objects tab, and click on the Image button. Clicking on the Image button will tell VisIt to create an empty image annotation object. Once you select an image file using the Image annotation object's controls in the Annotations window and click the Apply button, VisIt will load your image and insert it into your visualization.
- VisIt now supports 2D line annotation objects, which allow you to point to objects within your visualization. The lines have optional arrow endpoints that can be used to indicate direction.To add a 2D line annotation, open the Annotations window, click on the Objects tab, and click on the 2D line button.
- VisIt now supports multimeshes, multivars, multimaterials, and multispecies where some domains have no data. This means that in the multi-object definition, which usually points to the name of another file's variable for a particular domain, you can now provide "EMPTY" to indicate that the domain has no data. This enhancement prevents VisIt from failing to recognize when a mesh's domain list changes between time steps for certain database types.
- The MacOS X version of VisIt can now save images offscreen and perform scalable rendering.
- VisIt now has Moment of Inertia and Centroid queries.
- VisIt can now read in a set of image slices as a 3D volume. Simply create a file ending in ".imgvol" that contains the names of the image files that make up the 3D volume and VisIt will use the images to construct a 3D volume. This feature is useful for viewing CT data, which is often stored as a set of 2D images.
- VisIt's Image database reader plugin has been improved in a number of ways. For example, only processor 0 will read the image header now. Caching has been re-enabled and the reader can now generate ghost data.
- Expressions stored in a Silo file in the meshtv_defvars variable now show up if their names contain slashes.
- VisIt can now make movies using the window size stored in a session file if you omit the -geometry argument to the visit -movie script. There is also a new Make movie option that does this when you right-click on a session file on the Windows platform.
- VisIt's volume calculation is now tuned for rectilinear meshes. This quantity is used in several data analysis operations, for example calculating a weighted sum
- The Transform operator now changes the axis labels when switching from Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical or spherical coordinates.
- The KullLite database reader plugin can now adaptively switch its axis labels from X-Y to R-Z.
- VisIt's metadata server no longer automatically consolidates virtual databases of Flash files into larger virtual databases since that behavior caused problems for some users. If you want to make VisIt do this again, set the VISIT_CONSOLIDATE_VIRTUAL_DATABASES environment variable to on.
- Many optimizations were put in place to support large AMR problems with large numbers of patches.
- VisIt's ghost zone communication was heavily optimized.
- The following new math expressions were added: mod, round, ceil, and floor
- VisIt can now use expressions to calculate what your mesh's coordinates are in cylindrical coordinates. In addition, new expressions were added to access components of these coordinates -- cylindrical_radius and cylindrical_theta, as well as polar_radius, polar_theta, and polar_phi.
- VisIt's window layout logic has been changed so VisIt will always create the largest square windows in the available space.
- VisIt's rarely used 4x4 window layout has been replaced by a 2x3 window layout.
- VisIt now supports the creation of red/green stereo images.
- When VisIt issues a warning about bad input data, it now tells you which variables are incorrectly sized.
- The VisIt installation program for the Windows platform now migrates configuration files from earlier versions of VisIt (if any are found) to the new version of VisIt.

Bugs fixed in version 1.4.4

- VisIt's viewer can crash when picking on a vector field created using an expression.
- Expressions are being recalculated each time the user picks on a surface.
- It is not possible to select a high cell seed number for an OnionPeel operator that has been applied to a FilledBoundary plot.
- VisIt's Silo database reader plugin does not correctly recognize blocks/groups from HYDRA.
- VisIt can now correctly handle ghost zone construction when two domains contain more than one boundary.
- Creating an elevated Surface of a 2D dataset using the Elevate operator makes VisIt lose the ability to control lighting on that surface.
- The divergence expression now works on 2D vectors.
- Unhiding a Mesh plot when VisIt is in scalable-rendering mode forces the Mesh plot to be opaque.
- VisIt's image reader has several problems that result in incorrect colors being used as well as general inefficiency.
- Node picking on sliced FilledBoundary plots can return the wrong information because VisIt is not using the right coordinates to extract the data.
- Curves generated by Lineout operations look like their X coordinates are reversed.
- FilledBoundary plots of points can cause VisIt's point glypher to become confused if there are extra points in the dataset that do not belong to any cell.
- Pick is not displaying global zone or node ids when they have been requested.
- VisIt refuses to plot a FilledBoundary plot to which the Displace operator has been applied.
- Some VisIt filters do not make use of spatial and data extents when they should due to a coding issue a filter that is a facade for other filters.
- VisIt's visitconvert program issues a lot of warnings when converting image files to another format.
- Recentering a color image from zonal to nodal causes the Truecolor plot to display nothing.
- The spatial extents query now has the correct return type in the command-line interface
- Volume rendering now works correctly on rectilinear grids that have been reflected using the Reflect operator.
- Picking on plots using the mirvf expression yields incorrect results on second and subsequent picks.
- Picking on 2D Contour plots is broken.
- Pick letters are not visible with an opaque Mesh plot of Boxlib data.
- Node pick query over time for expression in Mili file fails.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the next version of VisIt: VisIt 1.4.5 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: VisIt 1.4.3 Release Notes.