Plants - Random Branches - 3

I finally also defined the third branch hierarchy and as far as I can see, it looks ok or even good. But I also ran into a new problem, the OpenGL rendering gets very slow. So I will try to make it faster and I even have some ideas of how to do that. I currently use the simplified representation for the stems. That always had a problem, I just used GL-lines and couldn't control the thickness very well. Also I drew them with the glBegin-paradigm which is slow. I started to fix that by first collecting all the data and then drawing it with one call. Also I will switch from lines to boxes with normals set as if it were a cylinder.

That still means I will construct and draw one structure per stem. I hope it is fast enough, if not I can still continue down that path by storing all the quads in one vertex array (or buffer object) and only recalculate when necessary.

But that still leaves all the objects which are currently drawn using some polyhedron. For that I also have an idea, I plan to collect the transformations in a vector per object type and then create functions which draw all of those objects in one go. The trick is, to give the polyhedron the ability to do so in an optimized fashion. I hope that all that is needed is to minimize switching buffer objects and materials, as that is fairly easy to implement.