[Bf-committers] Freestyle NPR for Blender: Call for

[Emmanuel Turquin]

Michael Crawford wrote :
> Forgive the user's peanut gallery comment, but Is Freestyle a true 
> renderer or a fancy post process?  If it is a renderer, i don't see 
> why it would belong in a compositing node (unless maybe it was an 
> "input").  Keep in mind, Maya's toonshading is accomplished with 
> paintFX (mainly a 2.5d effect composited internally in post).

What do you mean exactly by "fancy post-process"? If by that, you refer
to some kind of edge detector applied to a 2D image (or even a 2.5D one,
à la "G-buffer" or "deep framebuffer"), it's not the case. Freestyle's
workflow really starts in 3D object space, where it creates a graph
structure used to access all the information from the scene and generate
the final product, which is a shaded set of lines, i.e. currently a set
of 2D triangle strips living in image space. This far, we had both
OpenGL and Postscript backends to display these.
Freestyle being only a line-drawing tool, it seems it would
be convenient to be able to composite its output with some
other layers, e.g. shaded surfaces. This is (we think) why
this composite node idea was mentioned. Now, since we're not yet
very familiar with Blender, we don't know what a composite node
can or cannot do, where a compositing of the lines with other
elements should happen or even what type of output for these lines
would be most desirable from a compositing perspective.

> perhaps this can be discussed on the fun-board?

That's a very good idea, thanks; we'll start a thread on this topic.

Stéphane & Emmanuel