A new tree addon, part VI: continuing development

The latest version (0.2.14) includes a module written in C that implements some of the most time consuming functions. The result is a 20 - 30 % speedup for the generation of the branch skeleton. For now this is only available for 64 bit windows but on a different platform the addon will fall back on pure python implementations of these functions so cross platform portability is still guaranteed.

This is a quite noticable speedup: on my machine the generation of a tree consisting of 3000 branch segments went from 3.7s to 2.7s.

Implementation notes

The C extension module was compiled with Visual Studio 2013 and seems to work fine both with the official 2.70 distribution (compiled with MSVC 2008) and with the daily builds (compiled with MSVC 2013) but will only work with 64 versions of Blender. The Visual Studion solution is part of the spacetree repository so if people are interested in porting the module to other platforms they can have a go. Detailed notes on how to compile a native Python extension with Visual Studio 2013 were published in a separate article.

Undocumented stuff

This version of the addon also contains a first try at the implementation of branch shedding.

References

The space tree addon itself is introduced in a few articles on this blog and is available on GitHub. Relevant links are listed below:

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