“Little-R NPR” Renderer for Blender
Yiming Wu writes:
Hi Blender Community! I’ve been developing a external NPR system based on Blender. Blender’s Freestyle have some really nice features, but its speed and interaction is not very attracting, and its line quality on some of my models are just full of mess. Since last year I’ve been developing this little toy of mine, but now it kinda looks like it can handle some real projects, I ALREADY used this little toy to do some of my school works last year, turns out not really bad.
This thing can work in either Geometry mode (just like Freestyle’s ViewMap, but using a different faster approach, and even SUPPORT FULL MULTITHREADING! actual tests get 10X to 50X performance boost.), or Image mode (some mixed edge detecting technique, on GPU), both give very promising results. This external software can preview all result in realtime and change property like line style or color or group and see the result in no time. I can save the final Image whenever I like, and is rendered using OpenGL with preferred 16X MSAA, my hardware can handle large images like some 3300*5100px.
I have some really rough development documents here on my personal website since this summer vacation. (In Chinese)
Here are the Beautiful Screenshot post! You can click through and see the Screenshots!
Some of you may say why not just improve freestyle instead? I say the data structure in freestyle is not quite easy to change into mine since we use completly different approach, and standalone applications are just simpler to compile and test. By the way, my code for rendering is only somewhere near 13k lines long, I think in the future it won’t be so hard to move it in freestyle.
Now I’m improving some of the functions for it and planning to use it to output some images for school design competions. This little thing already have one-click Blender export-render-save function.:)
Anyone who is interested in this thing can contact me through [email protected] or [email protected]. I’m a industrial design student in Xi’an Jiaotong University, I’ll be glad to hear from you!
Holy crap! While I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to use this (because I don’t know Chinese), I still can’t wait to try it out!
Hi, this is what I need at this time, is there any way to have something to use?
Here some works I’m doing.
This looks amazing! I love the style and results they are very graphic intense and eye catching. The cassette tape player, the way you have the purple and red overlapping. I could see this coming in handy for 3D model to graphic design work.
Congrats on such amazing work.
wow, it’s amazing, is it possible merge into freestyle in the future.
Could be good, it’s a shame everything is in chinese, cant understand even where to download.
I had high hopes for Freestyle, but unfortunately it’s an unfinished, unpolished renderer and I’m always avoiding to use it as much as possible, because most of the time it’s a pain. For stills it could be ok, but for animations.. no, lines are flickering from frame to frame. Geometry intersection lines are not possible at all, complex meshes render super slow.. and so on. If someone can make something better, maybe using new methods, it would be great. I especially liked that he mentions multithreading and 50x speedup in some cases. Very cool. Please, please, develop this further and make information available in english!
If Chrome / your browser doesn’t automatically autotranslate, you can right click to bring up the option to translate.
it’s in japanese
yes, chinese :D
cool stuff
Good job
Proof of concept, and excellent results, get this into Blender now. Freestyle apparently is too hard to adapt to Cycles and EeVee for realtime, but this works, now! Translate and implement. Hire the developer.
Great to see this new direction.
Whoo! Nice job- Could you do calligraphic strokes? Thick to thin lines?
Please get this into the main branch development!!! Please..
Totally agree!!
Very cool!! I can think on many ways to use this nice tool: advertising, cartoons, end titles of movies, engineering,
need this… yesterday.
Is this an add-on or script? it is hard to say with the translated page.
Could you please post some links here to the latest download if possible?
This looks very cool. Who handles this portion of Blender? How much would it cost for them to implement this OR make Freestyle work through transparent planes? It is so frustrating not being able to have 2D image planes work within a 3D Freestyle scene; even the transparent parts of the 2D plane block the Freestyle strokes because Freestyle still cannot (after all these years) tell the difference between a transparent and an opaque object. I would very much like to help fund a solution for this, or a new line engine altogether.
Yiming Wu, do you think your renderer can work with 2 image planes with transparency? Is it also good for animations?