[Bf-committers] Bringing Freestyle back to Blender 2.8

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi Tamito,

Blender internal and its material system have not been removed yet, but
they are planned to be replaced by Eevee. I don't think anyone has actually
gone though what that entails in detail, since there is indeed code like
Freestyle and the texture system that rely on it even when not rendering
with BI.

I expect the first thing to keep things functional would be to stop relying
on the BI object/mesh data structures, and rather get geometry directly
from the Blender object/mesh data structures. This should be easier now
than it was when Freestyle was initially implemented, since there are now
functions like BKE_mesh_new_from_object to get a mesh from any type of
object. Some of this stuff will likely still evolve some as the dependency
graph is being worked on.

Materials I think would all be defined using node graphs, which should
already work with Freestyle? But for NPR work is needed to get back some
functionality from Blender Internal. There is no design for that yet as far
as I know, would be interesting to get some idea which extra nodes Eevee
needs.

In terms of integrating with render buffers, I hope the way it works with
Cycles as an external engine can also work for Eevee. So Eevee could
deliver render buffers the same way as Cycles and freestyle could composite
on top of them in the same way. Beyond that it would of course be really
cool if Freestyle could work in realtime on top of Eevee, showing OpenGL
accelerated line drawing in the viewport, but I guess that would be almost
a full rewrite of Freestyle.

Regards,
Brecht.


On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Tamito KAJIYAMA <rd6t-kjym at asahi-net.or.jp>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would like to discuss with the viewport team what precisely would be
> necessary to bring Freestyle back to Blender 2.8.  I was informed that
> the old material system and the Blender Internal renderer have been
> removed so that Freestyle won't work anymore.  The idea is to have a
> development plan of what needs to be done and until when.  Thoughts and
> suggestions are much welcome.  Thanks in advance for the input.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> KAJIYAMA, Tamito <rd6t-kjym at asahi-net.or.jp>
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