Version 1.2.2

New Features

Support for WRF and layered data

VAPOR now supports use of a terrain image on the terrain surface with WRF or other layered datasets.  A jpeg image can be loaded at run time (in the Visualizer Features panel) and will be displayed on the terrain surface.  The image can be rotated any multiple of 90 degrees or inverted, as needed.

WRF date/time stamps or VAPOR time step numbers can be displayed in the image, to enable users to identify the time associated with events during animation.  Time annotation is specified in the Visualizer Features panel.

The approximate vertical component of vorticity can be calculated during data conversion using wrf2vdf

Command-line tools

A new script is provided, “vdfls”, to list the files associated with at VAPOR VDC.

A new script is provided, “vdfbkup.pl”, to efficiently package vapor datasets and back them up.

Data probe/contour planes

The probe is resized when rotated using thumbwheels, so as to preserve the length of its sides in viewer space.

A selector is provided to rotate the probe 90 degrees about x-, y-, or z-axis.

Documentation

All documentation has been updated to include the capabilities added since version 1.1

A new tutorial, the “Georgia Weather Case Study” has been provided to help WRF users understand how to use VAPOR. This illustrates the use of VAPOR to visualize an unusual weather pattern that occurred in April 2007.

Bug Fixes

A complete list of bugs fixed by this release may be found on the SourceForge VAPOR project web site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vapor

Known bugs and workarounds

A few of the most frequently encountered bugs are described here.  For a full list of outstanding bugs, go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/vapor

1837484 – Various problems with rendering cards:  Some rendering cards may not correctly render isosurfaces or volume render.   Note that Vapor relies on features that are only available in rendering cards that have been released in the last 2-3 years, primarily from Nvidia and ATI. Sometimes these problems can be resolved by getting the latest graphics drivers.  Please report any rendering problems to vapor@ucar.edu, including information about your graphics card, such as the output of glxinfo on your system.

1863297 - Problems with multiple semi-transparent objects in scene.  Semi-transparent objects such as flow lines, probe texture, and isosurfaces do not correctly work together or with volume rendering.  To ensure correct results, use at most one semi-transparent object at a time.  Multiple semitransparent probes can work together if they are enabled in back to front order.  When using multiple isosurfaces, at most one can be partially transparent.  If the transparency of one isosurface is changed (from opaque to semi-transparent or vice-versa), that isosurface instance should be disabled and re-enabled.

1826150 – ncdf2vdf shortcomings.  The ncdf2vdf application does not correctly interpolate staggered coordinates. (The largest coordinate value is ignored when the dimension is one larger than the size specified in the metadata.)

1826405 – Cannot select or move leftmost color control point in transfer function editor.  A workaround is to click the mouse on the leftmost control point and click the delete key, then adjust the remaining color control point as needed.

Version 1.2

New Features

Isosurfaces

A hardware-accelerated isosurface renderer has been added to the list of available VAPOR visualizers. The isosurface renderer relies on some of the newest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) programming features and may not work with older graphics cards or out of date graphics drivers.

Spherical grid volume rendering

A prototype spherical grid direct volume renderer is available for testing. Like the isosurface renderer, the spherical grid volume renderer requires the latest graphics cards and drivers. Note, other visualizers (flow, probe, and iso) are not currently capable of handling spherical grid data

Support for WRF and layered data

VAPOR now supports the grid type “layered”, i.e. non-Cartesian grids that allow for each node to be displaced in the vertical (z) coordinate.   WRF (Weather Research Forecasting model) outputs such grids.  VAPOR includes the following capabilities to meet the needs of the WRF community:

• A suite of command line based data preparation tools have been added to facilitate converting WRF NetCDF files to VAPOR's VDC format.
• WRF data is reinterpolated on-the-fly to a Cartesian grid.  Users can specify the vertical grid size (in the Region panel) in order to obtain desired level of interpolation accuracy.
• A terrain surface (with user-specified color and refinement level) can be rendered in the scene.  This is set in the Visualizer Features panel
• Volumes can be stretched in all three dimensions, facilitating visualization of domains that are much larger or smaller in one dimension than the other dimensions.  Stretch factors are set in the Session Parameters panel.
• Arbitrary values can be assigned to variables at points above the top or below the bottom of the WRF grid, using the Session Parameters panel.

Miscellaneous

• Volume rendering now supports improved quality, allowing 16-bit rendering and pre-integration.
• Time-consuming animations and unsteady flow integrations can be halted and restarted.
• The data probe is automatically resized after rotation to always be no more than twice the data extents.
• A library of predefined transfer function (opacity and color) maps is supported.  A button is provided (on the DVR and Probe panels) to load a transfer function from the directory of installed transfer functions.
• Command line tools are provided to facilitate programmatic creation of transfer function maps.
• A command line tool “ncdf2vdf” is provided to convert NetCDF data to VAPOR data.
• The vdfcreate command line tool includes an option of setting the user time in the metadata.
• Coordinate axis annotation can be enabled (e.g. tic marks, axis coordinate labels) from the visualizer features panel.
• Improved handling of missing time steps:  Animation automatically skips time steps for which there is no data, also, for either animation or unsteady integration, lists of available time steps can be automatically constructed in the Animation and advanced Flow panels.
• Probe textures are automatically resized to agree with the resolution of the data being probed. 
• The graphics texture size can be specified (in terms of the length of the edge of a cube of volume data), to enable volume and isosurface rendering when the default texture size of the graphics hardware is too large or too small to render efficiently.  This value is specified in the session parameters.
• Data probe can be used to specify a point through which the isosurface passes.
• In the Viewpoint panel you can specify viewpoints to generate stereo pairs.  This feature is enabled by specifying a positive separation angle, and selecting either left, right, or center view.

Bug Fixes

A complete list of bugs fixed by this release may be found on the SourceForge VAPOR project web site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vapor

Version 1.1.2

New Features

Warning and Error Messages notify the user when they are about to be silenced.

There's a button on the Session Parameters "Resume All Messages" that causes silenced messages to display again.
The data cache size is not changed when you load metadata into default session.

Bug Fixes

A partial list of the most significant bugs follows. A complete list may be found on the SourceForge VAPOR project web site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vapor

1680864

Volume rendering boundary artifact

1680841

Viewpoints are now correctly restoring when a saved session is opened.

1678359

Errors and warnings for missing data do not repeat forever.

1686018

Flow seeds can be inserted using the probe without producing a warning message.

1685395

Transfer function color edits are seen immediately in the color bar.

1686211

Field magnitude is correctly mapped to flow color, independent of field scale factor.

1687022

Seed rake cannot be placed beyond the edge of the current region, so rakes at the edge do not result in invalid seeds.

1695690,1680062,1682397,1681630

Several crashes that occurred with probes and flow integration have been fixed.

Version 1.1.0

New Features

Mac OS X Support

Support has been added for the Mac OS X platform.

Data Probe

The data probe has been extended to act as a generalized planar sampling tool, i.e., a contour plane tool. 

• The probe/contour can be arbitrarily oriented within the data using thumbwheels.  
• Multiple contour planes can appear in the same volume
• To facilitate use as a contour plane, the thickness of the probe can be locked at zero. 
• An additional orientation angle (“psi”) provides control over rotation about the probe center axis.
• The probe's center planar slice may be saved in a jpeg file as a contour plane image.

Animation

The animation panel now supports explicit specification of time steps, to support animation with arbitrary time-stepping.

Flow Visualization

The GUI for the flow visualization tools has been substantially reworked to improve ease-of-use.   The flow panel now provides a “Field Line Advection” capability, supporting animating magnetic field lines in the presence of a velocity field.   Less frequently-used features of the flow GUI have been segregated into an “Advanced” subsection. Some of the new capabilities include:

• Support for periodic boundary conditions (in x, y, and/or z)
• Steady flow integration can be forward, backward, or bidirectional
• Steady flow integration can automatically scaled, enabling control via length and smoothness sliders
• Random flow seeding can be biased, placing more seeds where a field has highest or lowest magnitude.  The field that is used for this placement (Seed distribution field) can be specified by the user
• Flow seed points can be saved to a file.
• Step-by-step instructions are provided for setting up unsteady flow integration and field line advection.  Warning messages are provided to alert the user to most flow specification errors.
• Unsteady flow integration can be either forward or backward in time.
• Unsteady flow integration can sample an arbitrary set of time steps
• Field line advection supports specification of an arbitrary “prioritization” field, that is used to determine which points along a steady field line are advected, in determining the seeds to be used at the next time step.

Volume Rendering

A prototype spherical grid volume rendering engine has been implemented. Contact the VAPOR team for more information.

Opacity editing

The opacity editors (used in the DVR and probe transfer function editors, and in flow panel opacity mapping) have improved (flicker-free) drawing, and support the use of multiple opacity widgets.  The following capabilities are selectable with the right-mouse button:

• Each widget controls the location of either a Gaussian or a linearly interpolated curve. 
• The opacity mapping at a point can be either the sum or the product of the applicable opacity curves.
• Histogram scaling in the opacity editors can be linear, logarithmic, or Boolean.

General changes

Context-sensitive help is available, to provide in-depth technical explanations of features in the user interface.   Click on Help → “Explain this”, then click on a GUI element (text box, slider, combo box, etc.) to obtain an explanation of that element. The rendering parameter tabs (DVR, flow, and probe) can now be multiply instanced, so that any number of these can be associated with the same visualizer.  This has several consequences:

• Only one DVR can render at one time, while many different flow or probe renderers can be actively rendering in a visualizer. 
• The ‘enable/disable’ selector of the renderer panels has been replaced by a table of renderer instances, each entry of which can be selected, enabled, edited, copied, or deleted.
• The renderer panels can no longer have a local/global scope:  They are always local to one visualizer.

Bug Fixes

A partial list of the most significant bugs follows. A complete list may be found on the SourceForge VAPOR project web site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vapor

Vapor GUI Bug Fixes

1633556

Loading a data set that contains fewer than three variables may result in a core dump

1654409

Loading a new session file may cause a crash

1654393

vaporgui can crash when loading a data set into current session

1654541

Orientation of the probe may be flipped from left to right.

1658356

Volume renderer fails to render large volumes with high aspect ratios.

Known Bugs & Work Arounds

A partial list of the most significant known bugs follows. A complete list may be found on the SourceForge VAPOR project web site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vapor

vaporgui

1672633

Vaporgui will silently fail to start on the Mac if the X server is not running

Vapor Data Collection

1665502

Windows and Mac OS X file systems do not support "sparse" files. Hence, writing a variable subregion results in a file as large as if the entire variable had been written.

Version 1.0.3

New Features

The volume rendering performance of the 3DTexture-Shader and 3DTexture renderers has been improved.  This improvement is especially significant with very large volumes.

Shading is now supported in volume rendering, when the 3DTexture-Shader renderer is used in the DVR panel.  The “Lighting On” checkbox at the bottom of the DVR panel enables this feature.  This checkbox has no effect when a renderer type other than 3DTexture-Shader is used.  The use of lighting improves the appearance of the volume rendering with somewhat slower rendering.  The position and other properties of the volume rendering light source are controlled by the settings of the first light in the Viewpoint panel.

The flow panel layout was changed, putting the variable names on one horizontal line, and rearranging some of the buttons and check boxes in the flow seeding parameters.

An additional flow parameter “Arrowhead size” was added, specifying the arrow head diameter relative to the arrow shaft diameter.

Lighting coefficients were added to the viewpoint panel, allowing setting of diffuse, specular, and ambient lighting coefficients, as well as a shininess parameter. 
The lighting orientation now specifies the light direction relative to the view direction.  (Previously the light direction was in world coordinates).   Default light orientation and lighting coefficients were changed.  The attributes of the first light (light 1) are used in volume rendering when dvr lighting is enabled.  All three lights can be used in flow rendering.

Bug Fixes

Session:
A session change would sometimes result in a crash (if the new session used different dimensions than the first).  Also, loading new data into an existing session would sometimes crash. When a session with multiple visualizers was restored, sometimes the visualizer selector would indicate an incorrect active visualizer.

Probe:
When the probe was rotated a nonzero theta or phi angle, and the right mouse button was used to stretch its bounds, there was an error in calculating the motion constraint, that sometimes prevented the probe bounds from sliding.  When a seed point that was attached to the probe was deleted from the seed list, sometimes a crash would result.

Flow:
When the flow integration was being calculated in a large region, sometimes the calculation would stall indefinitely or result in incorrect flow lines because the data cache was not large enough to contain all three variables at once.  Now there is an error message and the integration will not proceed if the cache is too small. When the opacity or color of flow line was determined by mapping a variable in the dataset, this would sometimes result in a crash. During flow integration, the threshold that determines whether or not a flow point is stationary was not being scaled correctly, resulting in incorrect identification of stationary points when large vector scale factors were used. Two- and three-dimensional nonrandom seed rakes were not resulting in a regular array of seed points. Seed points for unsteady flow could not be specified to start after the first time step. The interval of time steps used for unsteady flow was incorrectly ignoring the starting and ending animation time steps.

Image Capture:
The file selection panel, which pops up when the user requests image capture, would initially appear in front of the visualizer.  As a result the captured images would often show the popup.  Now the panel is narrower and initially appears at the left side of the GUI. Not all frames of a changing flow visualization were being captured when image capture was enabled.

Region:

The size of the current region (in megabytes), displayed at the bottom of the region panel, was being incorrectly calculated.

Data loading:
When metadata was being merged (imported) multiple times, some variables were being lost.

Windows:
On Windows, the IDL library was not working.

Some of the command line tools were crashing.

Known Bugs & Work Arounds

On Windows, if you have previously installed Vapor, sometimes the application will crash or fail to launch.  You must make sure that the newly installed bin directory is at the start of your execution path, and that the variable IDL_DLM_PATH points to the new bin directory.  Neither the path nor the IDL_DLM_PATH should point to previously installed VAPOR software.  It is strongly recommended that you delete all software from previous VAPOR installations.

Sometimes clicking the “home” button will cause the scene to disappear.  Dragging slightly in the scene with the right mouse (and releasing) will make it reappear.

Sometimes the probe histogram will appear blank.  This can occur when the probe size is zero in one or more dimensions.  Slightly increasing the size, or moving the probe, and then clicking the “Histo” button, will result in a nonzero histogram.

When you change the transfer function in the Probe panel, it may not immediately refresh the probe cross-section view, or the probe view in the scene.  To refresh the probe, click on another tab, and then click on the probe tab.

Sometimes HSV color values larger than 90 cannot be typed into the Color Selector in the DVR panel.  These colors can still be set with the left mouse in the colored region of the Color Selector.  If you need to set HSV values numerically, then click with the right mouse on the color bar, select “adjust color control point” and set the HSV values in the color chooser that is displayed.

Sometimes, when editing the seed point list in the Flow Panel, the “Delete seed” button is not enabled.  You may need to click on different seeds to enable that button.

When the seed rake in the flow panel is placed at the bounds of the current region, sometimes no flow lines will result.  The rake may need to be repositioned slightly inside the region for resulting flow lines to show up.

The leftmost and rightmost values of the histograms, displayed in the DVR panel and the Probe panel, may be confusing, because they are higher than nearby values, and because they can be concealed by the grey vertical lines at the left and right ends of the transfer function edit bounds.  The values at the end points of the histogram indicate the cumulative count of data values beyond the right or left end of the histogram.  Slide the histogram bound slightly to the right or left to display the end bars of the histogram.

Bugs and workarounds remaining from the Vapor 1.0.0 Release Notes:

On Windows, the Probe window sometimes has extra cruft around the texture. You can get a clean image by clicking another tab, and then returning to the probe tab.

It is sometimes impossible to pause an animation, if the system is busy loading volume data. To avoid this, single-step through the animation, or set short animation bounds before starting an animation that requires access to high-resolution data.

The first image of a jpeg capture sequence is often captured twice. You may need to renumber the images resulting from your capture sequence.

Warning messages result when a session file that was created on one system is read on another system, and paths in the session files may not be valid because of system-specific paths. When you load a session file that was created on another system, you can edit the session parameters to set appropriate file names and paths.

At the completion of playing an animation, the play button remains depressed. You may need to click the pause button before playing again, to avoid a warning message.

There is a spurious error popup when you click Data->Merge and then cancel. It can be ignored.

Data Import/Export only works with latest (Version 2) metadata. You will get an error message if you attempt to import or export older metadata. Convert your old data (using vdf2raw and raw2vdf) before using import/export

In data probe mode, if your probe is not axis-aligned, you cannot stretch or shrink the probe size by sliding the probe handles in the scene. Use the size sliders in the probe tab instead.

Version 1.0.2

Version 1.0.1

Bug Fixes

• Volume rendering large volumes (>256^3) using the 3DTexture or 3DTexture-Shader resulted in extremely poor performance on some graphics cards/drivers, and on others would not render at all. Reduced maximum texture bricking size to addresss.

Version 1.0.0

Unimplemented Features:

• Keyboard shortcuts are not implemented
• “Copy Settings to…” buttons on parameter tabs are not implemented.
• Load and save of Viewpoints not supported
• Lighting and setting shading parameters of DVR not supported
• Quantization of DVR and Probe textures is limited to 8-bits
• Animation, Script, and Help pull-down menus are not implemented

Known Bugs and workarounds

• The user interface can crash if buttons are clicked before any data or session has been loaded.
• Data Export only exports the full resolution specified in the metadata. If the highest resolution data is not available, you need to create a vdf file that specifies the actual available resolution of your data
• On Windows, the Probe window sometimes has extra cruft around the texture. You can get a clean image by clicking another tab, and then returning to the probe tab.
• Unsteady flow is always calculated for the full time-step interval in the metadata, even if the animation start/end time-steps are a subset of the full interval
• If data is loaded into an existing session and the data is incompatible with previously loaded data in the session, sometimes the application will crash without warning. Avoid this by loading into a new session.
• With some graphics cards, the volume rendering will be very slow with large volumes (e.g. 256x512x512). You may improve rendering performance by upgrading to the latest NVidia graphics card, or by using the SGI Volumizer renderer.
• The texture displayed in the probe in the scene is not updated during animation. You need to click on the Probe tab to update the values in the probe to the current time-step.
• It is sometimes impossible to pause an animation, if the system is busy loading volume data. To avoid this, single-step through the animation, or set short animation bounds before starting an animation that requires access to high-resolution data.

Minor issues and workarounds:

• When you capture a jpeg image of a visualizer the “Choose Jpeg File” dialog will sometimes be captured in the image. To avoid this, slide the dialog away from the image you are capturing.
• If you are capturing a long animation sequence, be sure to turn off the screen-saver, it will interfere with the capture.
• The first image of a jpeg capture sequence is often captured twice. You may need to renumber the images resulting from your capture sequence.
• Warning messages result when a session file that was created on one system is read on another system, and paths in the session files may not be valid because of system-specific paths. When you load a session file that was created on another system, you can edit the session parameters to set appropriate file names and paths.
• At the completion of playing an animation, the play button remains depressed. You may need to click the pause button before playing again, to avoid a warning message.
• There is a spurious error popup when you click Data->Merge and then cancel. It can be ignored.
• Data Import/Export only works with latest (Version 2) metadata. You will get an error message if you attempt to import or export older metadata. Convert your old data (using vdf2raw and raw2vdf) before using import/export
• In data probe mode, if your probe is not axis-aligned, you cannot stretch or shrink the probe size by sliding the probe handles in the scene. Use the size sliders in the probe tab instead.