Kitware Adds ANARI Support to VTK to Simplify Access to Accelerated 3D Rendering Engines

Image: Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) bacteria surface dataset rendered with VTK using ANARI and the VisRTX rendering library. Source: Kevin Griffin, senior developer technology engineer at NVIDIA.

NIST to demonstrate multiple ANARI-enabled visualization tools at SuperComputing 2023 including VMD, VTK, & VTK-m

Kitware and NVIDIA have collaborated to integrate ANARI™, the open, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API from the Khronos® Group, into VTK (Visualization Toolkit). VTK is a cross-platform and feature-rich data analysis and visualization toolkit used in application domains ranging from medical imaging to large-scale scientific visualization. Through this integration, ANARI offers VTK users seamless access to a rich set of hardware-accelerated 3D rendering engines and capabilities. Kitware is also working to expose ANARI in ParaView, their state-of-the-art visualization application built on VTK. Exposing ANARI parameters in the ParaView user interface provides access to the rich world of accelerated 3D rendering engines enabled through the cross-platform ANARI API.

Kevin Griffin, senior developer technology engineer at NVIDIA, Khronos member, and lead developer for the ANARI integration into VTK, has also initiated adding ANARI support to VisIt, an open source, interactive, scalable, visualization, animation, and analysis tool that is built on VTK.

“We are very excited about the release of ANARI 1.0 and its integration with VTK. ANARI will help us provide our users with natively accelerated high-end rendering capabilities on multiple platforms. This capability is essential for the scientific discovery process,” said Berk Geveci, senior director of Scientific Computing, Kitware. 

Additional visualization tools working to add support for ANARI include the molecular dynamics applications OVITO and VMD. Future releases of those tools expect to make ANARI a mainstream component of their application for the benefit of their end users. 

In addition to ANARI being widely used in both open source and commercial scientific visualization tools, there is increasing interest from diverse application domains that can benefit from portable, accelerated access to multiple rendering engines delivering sophisticated 3D functionality such as ray tracing and global illumination. Watch out for the ANARI API being exposed by a rendering engine near you!

See ANARI in Action at Supercomputing 2023 

At SC23, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a Khronos member active in the ANARI Working Group, will showcase visualization tools powered by the ANARI API. The demonstration will include VMD (the Visualization of Molecular Dynamics tool), VTK, and VTK-m, a visualization library that enables data processing on many core devices such as GPUs. 

Catch these live demonstrations at the NIST booth #1580 from November 12-17, 2023, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO.

About ANARI

The final ANARI 1.0 API specification and SDK was released in August 2023 and was recently ratified by The Khronos Group.

ANARI is a cross-platform 3D rendering engine open standard that significantly simplifies the development of visualization applications looking to leverage the power of accelerated 3D rendering through a single API. ANARI provides high-level functionality to enable developers to build an in-memory scene representation to be rendered without the need to use proprietary low-level graphics libraries. ANARI provides rendering engines the semantics to expose innovation through extensions; access asynchronous scene updates and zero-copy data arrays for low frame latency; and ultimately create beautifully rendered imagery without proprietary APIs, all while enabling the interactivity necessary for exploratory visualization.

ANARI is now widely integrated into scientific visualization applications and is used by diverse domains needing portable access to multiple rendering engines to deliver sophisticated 3D functionality such as ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI applications can be run across a wide variety of rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX. There is also a proof-of-concept Blender ANARI add-on in the ANARI SDK plus an NVIDIA ANARI-USD implementation, enabling any ANARI application to generate USD output for use in the Omniverse platform.

The ANARI 1.0 specification was developed with full public access to the specification and incorporates significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF™ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.

Khronos welcomes feedback from the visualization development community at the ANARI GitHub.

Learn more at: www.khronos.org/anari