The latest issue of Scientific Computing World has a nice 3-page article on Scientific Visualization, based on some classes and tutorials at recent events. They start off with a typical SciVis pipeline (Kudos to them for actually including “postprocess” after Render, so many groups stop at Render), and discuss several commercial and freely available package ranging from IDL to VTK.
If you’re already a SciVis guru then you probably won’t get much from it, but it’s a great article for scientists or newcomers to see what’s available.
