Blender + Freestyle

I think I've mentioned the open source standalone renderer called Freestyle in other posts. I think I mentioned the interface was a little mind-blowing trying to figure it out while playing with other projects. If I mentioned this, then I also explained that the makers of Freestyle are working with the makers of Blender to incorporate Freestyle rendering directly into blender. In fact, while they work on it, there are test 'builds' available at graphicall.org which are the latest blender with Freestyle built right in as a post-process composite style render layer.

Oh, before I get to the meaty potatoes, I will drop some links. When I say Freestyle is a renderer, I forget to mention that its purpose is to simulate/replicate sketching and painting over a 3D scene/model. Okay, bad explanation. The Freestyle main page is: http://freestyle.sourceforge.net/ I recommend hitting gallery at the top and seeing what it can do.

That said, with blender being my 3D weapon of choice, this integration of Freestyle opens a lot of new possibilities IF I can spend some time and figure the damn thing out!!! But...I do believe I have found the needed motivation...


Oh hell...while I'm here....


OMG I have to figure out how to use this...watch this demo reel!!!

Dude! That tank video makes me want to play Valkyria Chronicles again!!!

Indeed that video is very Valkyria Chronicles-ish! That's what I thought of too! I would love to say this Freestyle rendering could be used for making some nice gaming models of that caliber (imagine a game of Quake or Unreal where the players had crisp cartoon outlines but the rest of the world did not!...okay that sounds lame now that I picture it...). Freestyle is a renderer, so in the trunk build of blender that has freestyle built in, it becomes a post-process composite filter. Scene renders full, then calculates edges and applies the strokes.

That said, I have started the learning process! The power of Freestyle, combined with Blender, will enable much more interesting, stylized animations and stills. Due to watching some anime with blowing curtains right before I started this mini project, I wanted to see if I could make nice animated curtains, keeping in mind I've started grasping wind and vortex effector forces in my sakura videos. Know what? Enough. I made curtains, hit them with wind, then Freestyled....here it is... (oh yeah, will add making this required a quick figuring out of cloth pinning so the tops of the curtains stayed put. Got it! )

Not involving Freestyle, I just watched some WOW. Blender demo reel for SIGGRAPH 2011. Straight from the wiki, SIGGRAPH is: the name of the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. That said, this is some of the absolute best blender work I have ever seen. Just frickin WOW...