Matt,
I have a couple mega-trees that use dumb strings. Each tree has 16 strings, and each string is treated as 1 RGB "pixel".
If I select a Tree270, or any of the tree representations, the result is a row of 16 small dots. Its hard to get an appreciation of the specific effects on that model...
I believe the use of dumb strings might be somewhat common, and there might be a few variations in their use that would make sense to both extend and generalize within the visualizer.
I've seen people take a 5M dumb string and then cut it into 5 x 1M segments. The result is 5 RGB pixels per string... but to the world they still have the appearance of segments, not single pixels.
Similarly, there are people using the grouping features of the controllers to reduce channel count in the smart strings. In this case a 100-pixel string with 5 groups might be treated in software in much the same way as 5 dumb string segments.
My suggestion is to add a new checkbox for the Line, Arch, and all Tree* models "
When this option is selected, it does not change the way channels are generated, only the way that the visualizer (both Nutcracker tab and Preview tab) display the tree.
When disabled, the trees will continue to work as-is.
When enabled, the trees will look like this...