Dear maintainers,
Recently, two issues were closed that were not actually solved for several years. I indicated this in comments but there was no reaction.
https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/work_items/17302
https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/work_items/17325
I’d like to ask if this part of the code is foreseen to be maintained, or the plan is to abandon it? I think in either case the solution should be different than simply closing the issues about existing problems. Thank you!
Hi @cpinter,
Thanks for pinging us about this. Closing #17302 and #17325 without resolving the underlying bugs was an oversight during issue triage.
To answer your question directly: yes, that code is still maintained as part of VTK and we have no plans to deprecate or abandon it since it serves an important volume rendering use case.
If you have the bandwidth to put together a merge request for either of these issues, I’d be more than happy to review it and help get it merged.
Thank you for the reply @sankesh, and for re-opening the issues!
If you have the bandwidth to put together a merge request for either of these issues, I’d be more than happy to review it and help get it merged.
Although I did fix one or two problems in vtkMultiVolume in the past (the ability to turn on shading for example), the main issue is that the way it assembles the string to produce the shader code is so complex that making any change in a robust way is super hard. We have a breakout session at the Slicer PW every year about these shaders and not much is changing so far 
I recently heard about attempts to revamp some problematic classes in VTK rendering (I assumed this one included) using Claude Code + skills, let’s see how it goes. I’ll coordinate with those people and try to move it forward and help if I can.