Previously, Mikktspace just bucketed the vertices based on one spatial coordinate and then ran full pairwise comparisons inside each bucket.
However, since models are three-dimensional, the bucketing has a massive false-positive rate, and since pairwise comparison is O(n^2), the merging process is very slow.
But, since we only care about exactly identical vertices, there is a much more efficient approach - we can just hash all values belonging to each vertex and form buckets based on the hash.
Since the hash has 32 bits and considers all values, false-positives are very unlikely - and since both hashing and the radixsort that's used for bucketing are O(n), both asymptotical and
real-world performance (as well as code complexity) are significantly improved.
Now we replace O(N^2) computational complexity with O(N) extra memory penalty.
Memory is much cheaper than CPU time. Keep in mind, memory penalty is like
4 megabytes per 1M vertices.
Don't use quick sort for small arrays, bubble sort works way faster for small
arrays due to cache coherency. This is what qsort() from libc is doing actually.
We can also experiment unrolling some extra small arrays, for example 3 and 4
element arrays.
This reduces tangent space calculation for dragon from 3.1sec to 2.9sec.
Brings tangent space calculation from 4.6sec to 3.1sec for dragon model in BI.
Cycles is also somewhat faster, but it has other bottlenecks.
Funny thing, using simple `static inline` already gives a lot of speedup here.
That's just answering question whether it's OK to leave decision on what to
inline up to a compiler..
Add a safe version of normalize since all uses of normalize
did zero length checks, move this into a function.
Also avoid unnecessary conversion.
Gives minor speedup here (approx 3-5%).
intended as a standalone library for use in other applications that
want the same tangent space as Blender.
This also keeps blenkernel clean(er) from extra math functions.
